I think this is amazing. Love Kagi. I’m happy to pay for a good search.
Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
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).
I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
I wouldn't say it's better, it's a great alternative though. I find that for some tasks I much prefer doing a search myself as I may not trust the sources it's pulling from, but for others it's not only adequate but much faster.
I think it's a great complement to human lead search.
"Able to find things that regular search cannot" is pretty much the value-add for AI in Google as well. The blue links are becoming less and less helpful.
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
> So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
Is it actually, really? Even late 90s most stuff was garbage, and been like that for as long as I've been on the internet, or maybe I've just always been jaded. But the ratio of "garbage to non-garbage" seems constant for as long as I can remember, multiple decades at this point. The tools for finding the signal through the noise have changed over time though.
I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.
Probably true. That said, I spend most of my time querying LLMs for more objective and less financially motivated information. The only time I ask for recommendations is for new routes to explore by bike, and even then it will adapt if you tell it why a route is bad.
I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone will figure out how to game the system. Even if it could be resolved, the queries would have to focus on objective criteria ("best" is too subjective).
But then once you get shit results, don't you iterate on the prompt and try again? In this case, add what you actually care about, not just "best cuisine" which can mean a lot of things, and also straight up tell it to not focus on the website or whatever, then eventually you'll get somewhat reasonable and applicable results.
Nope--I was on vacation, walked to the place, and saw it looked like a disaster, but then everyone was hungry and we were already out and about. Too late for more research. I picked a place the old-fashioned way, by walking around and seeing what was nearby. We did fine.
I remember people using Yahoo and AltaVista a lot. And before gmail everyone had a yahoo email (if they didn't already have a hotmail). Times change, kings fall from grace.
Google has been the dominant force for about 80% of the internet’s existence. I understand things come and go, but Google is incredibly unique. Their importance cannot be overstated
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
I also confirm the $5 you get is only promotional credit.
I tested on my local LLM chat via Open WebUI, 2 requests from that cost $0.02 (so $4.98 left), and after my monthly Kagi renewal an hour ago, it did not reset, I am still on $4.98.
You are probably better off using Kagi Assistant anyways, as you get $10 there on the $10 Professional plan.
For local LLM web searches, to save on cost I will stick with the Brave Search API which gives you $5 free every month.
You know now that I think of it me too. I absolutely never used the free google one because I never trusted it (you know what they say about free things).
If I'm paying for it through Kagi, I could at least trust their incentives are aligned with mine instead of whoever is paying them the most.
> presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop
Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?
My assumption is something like the google shopping feature. This shows the product you're looking for at all available sites in your country so you can purchase the cheapest one.
I've been using Kagi assistant for this for quite a while. I just run a query with some variation of "Compile a list of online stores with shipping+price, sorted by the average user review score of the entire site, sub-sorted by price where I can buy $foobar?" sometimes I have to give it another push to tell it options or where to look, but this works pretty well for comparison shopping.
LLMs are not magic, nor are they gonna crawl some dozens of websites, they work with search results they are provided with, and thus they need good search results to work with. Maybe in the US or sth it is better, but where I live finding good shopping results from local shops/websites is not straightforward. Google shopping, that I just now checked, seems much better with querries that I struggled with kagi. Typically, in order to find things I need I usually run searches on local price aggregators than kagi, though it is not perfect because they do not include shops that don't want to pay them, and their search features are not great either. But running kagi for local search shopping results ime is not great, and similarly the assistant do not provide great results either.
I do not want a click-to-buy button, I want kind of lens that is specialised for shopping within specific regions (the current kagi lenses allow only 10 sites which is not really enough for shopping).
I meant, they are not gonna start from scratch by crawling websites, they are gonna rely on the search results to grab content of relevant results. I think this is what research does, in a higher quantity.
In contrast, I may start with a page in a website and start going around looking for related products etc. The assistant is not gonna start doing that (I think at least), it just gonna get the page provided by the search results. For this reason, what search results it is provided with is important.
I am also (mostly) buying online, but for certain reasons I want to buy from domestic websites rather than ones based in other countries, if possible. Kagi has not been great at providing great results for that.
I use pi and librechat and I am really limited by the lack of proper web connector. Testing Tavily right now, Kagi is next.
I wonder why I see so few comments about it on HN, does everybody have this figured out already? Am I a dummy? Am I severely overstating how important of a frature web access and search is for LLM use?
I use Claude code for basically everything, since the harness is pretty complete. The online chat interface works fine too. For basic research I downgrade the model and effort. Smarter models are good at knowing when to web search rather than guess, but you should always specify “do a web search”.
The one caveat is opus has an absolutely awful voice. The way it writes is annoying and verbose. Sonnet actually works better for this type of thing.
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.
There is a lot that agents can help with wrt search, but they also have a lot of blind spots. They work well many times, but then there are times where I find stuff that multiple llms missed. Imo this is gonna work as in many other domains, as in the more different tools one is proficient with (searching with llms, searching traditionally etc) the more successfully one solves problems.
Funny how that works out, because AI is the solution to a problem significantly worsened by AI. The web didn't used to be this terrible before chatGPT, now it's just so much slop. At this point AI is required to sift through all the bullshit caused at least in part by AI.
Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.
It's that good because the language model they use is expensive I'm pretty sure. I haven't seen many details on what they use, but it's apparently a loss leader for them and already can no longer be used for free.
Meanwhile google translate is probably served on the cheapest model they could muster.
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.
I probably put !expert in half my searches and rely on Kagi for most of my research that isn't just agent context gathering (and a fair amount of what _is_ just context gathering). It's excellent and cites good sources.
Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps.
This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.
Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
I have Kagi and ChatGPT subs and would agree ChatGPT is the better offering. But you can use Luna with Kagi Assistant on the cheap plan which works pretty well too
I became so annoyed by google's ai overview and front page results that I am using 99% duckduckgo as the least bad free alternative for the other leg from my chatgpt usage in this context.
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.
Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best.
> They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data.
I like this too, but it isn't as bulletproof as it sounds. I've run into two instances in the past week where it confidently gave me wrong information, because it ran into a search result that had wrong information, and it trusted that information.
You could perhaps say that's fine; if you were doing the search yourself, you'd get the same results and might trust the wrong information too. But the "might" there is... oh boy, I'm gonna say it... load-bearing: someone is much more likely to believe the confident LLM response than if they were looking directly at the primary source, along with search results with other sources that might contradict it.
I just wish it were easier to keep up with which models are good for what. Especially with the introduction of the research assistant, I have no idea whether I should be using that or one of the standalone models. And don't even get me started on trying to pick the best open model, it's always fluctuating.
I often try 2 different models with the same prompt in case one misses anything. But most of the times I do not see much difference. Newer models do not seem to improve search that much, so I do not think you have to stress too much about new models etc. In general I stick with kimi 2.6 reasoning because it is very very cheap and does thorough searching. I do not see much gains with using more expensive models like opus etc, so I prefer to use multiple cheaper, open models simultaneously except for "harder" queries. The advantage of the cheaper open models is that you can prompt 2-3 of them and if you see the results unsatisfactory you can retry with more expensive ones. And ime sometimes models that are not talked much, like gemini pro, perform quite good.
I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.
I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1].
I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.
I use it all the time.
I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.
With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.
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 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.
I think the first time around they were included with the free shirt they sent out. Second time they were with the free socks. Maybe general merch store orders might include them too.
I was subscribed to Kagi for a while but cancelled because there was no subscription for JUST search that didn't include their inferior AI assistant. Why am I paying for it?
If you compare the Professional plan (unlimited searches), to the API, you could justify that the extra AI cost is negligable if you are heavy user. The API costs $12 per 1000 searches, so 1.2¢ per individual search. 10/0.0012≈833.33. At 834 searches or more you would not be paying for the AI features. Obviously, this is only a comparison to the API, which might not have all special Kagi features.
But if you're using the starter plan, which is 300 searches for $5, then you definitely do pay for the assistant. The API cost would be $3.60.
Is it actually good, like 2006 good? Can I go to page 300 rabbit hole and find some obscure website nobody knows with interesting content on the topic I am researching?
Unfortunately, those days might be good no matter what - a lot of those sites have disappeared with their hosting platforms (e.g Geocities). That said, I have been able to find them on Kagi with a bit of effort.
Kagi also has a Small Web feature which is meant to surface exactly that sort of thing. It's not amazing, but I appreciate it existing. I think you can get a "random small web page" kind of thing even without a subscription here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
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!
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) 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. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
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.
That's not how a micropayments system would work, and you don't need a token system.
It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card to put some amount of money on the card itself, say $20, and then every time I use transit, the payment system just deducts $2.85 from my balance. Once my balance goes below a threshold I set, it charges my card again to top up the balance.
So instead of seven $2.85 charges, there's one $20 charge.
A micropayments system would charge you that $20 once, and then deduct 20¢ from your balance every time you read an article. For 100 articles, you've charged the card only once.
It would work similarly on the website side: the micropayments platform wouldn't send a deposit over to the website owner every single time a visitor paid 20¢; it would aggregate payments and either pay out on a timed schedule, or when some minimum dollar amount is reached.
You don't need a token system for this; denominating the "wallet" balance in dollars (or whatever the user's currency is) is fine. A token system might be useful in order to make pricing easier from the website operator's side, but IMO they suck because they hide the actual amount of money the user is paying. It sort of like when you visit a foreign country where you're not familiar with the currency, and so you see that something costs 1,000,000 foobits, and it has no meaning to you, because the exchange rate with your own currency is something like 1:4285.
Whatever the solution is they'd better get to it because I'm not going to subscribe to every site that wants 20/month just because it shows once on HN or in search results.
Your comment illustrates the tension very well, I think. Businesses don't generally want customers who aren't their core market; those people though, often want one slice of a business's offerings. This can lead to big distractions for businesses, as putting in the effort to serve the wrong market is a waste of time. The publishing industry really fell for this when the internet became widespread; they dreamed of huge audiences and big ad numbers. Turns out, that was not a model that worked, at all. The model that works is focusing on serving a niche, and charging a subscription fee, so you can get predictable revenue.
That for some reason makes me think of those sites where you can insta subscribe online but you need to call and wait on hold for 6 hours to cancel :)
You know what's missing from this model? Back a million years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs, you could pay for a magazine issue on the street if it seemed interesting. And maybe if you found enough issues interesting you subscribed.
The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.
Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here.
> How do you price articles?
The same way anything else in life is priced: you price at whatever the market can bear.
> And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views?
Also precedent there: online video rental/"purchase". You can decide what model you like better, and see if people want to pay what you ask. You can even offer both, just as is the case for many videos on Amazon, for example.
> but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half.
Yes, that's one of the pitfalls of setting pricing, that every business has to deal with. Note that this problem is present with the monthly subscription model too: half of New York Times subscribers might cancel if the subscription price doubled.
That's a general problem with pricing: determining how much you can raise your price without losing an equivalent (or greater) amount of revenue due to losing customers.
(As an aside, sometimes doubling your prices and exactly halving your customer base is desirable. Fewer customers to deal with at the same overall revenue level might be a net positive. But of course losing a single customer then becomes twice as bad as losing a single customer at the previous pricing.)
> On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.
> They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Yup. Recurring subscription revenue is stable and predictable; one-time per-article revenue is not.
> Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here.
In that case, I fail to understand the benefits of using a token system over a credit card. The publisher is loosing a cut to another third party. The consumer is dealing with an extra layer of complexity, and paying more to offset the cost to the publisher.
> This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.
Do you blame the consumer? Not only do they have to decide whether the article is worth reading, they have to do so sight unseen. While there are some who simply want all-you-can-eat plans, there are plenty who would be happy to pay by the article if they knew the article was digestable (at least in cases where it would be cheaper to buy one article they are interested in, rather than for a month at the buffet table).
Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.
Lots of smart people have tried to implement micropayments like this, and it has never worked.
Publishers would rather have the chance at $10 than give up the chance at $10 for 10c. And readers don’t want to be thinking about their credit balance every time they read an article.
It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...
Everyone knows about Monero. If someone doesn't we can count on someone ensuring we do. But I can say with certainty that anyone who knows what a ZKP is knows about Monero even though Monero doesn't use ZKPs
Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?
The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
> 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!"
Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.
I use kagi. The results quality is pretty good, but I probably use the uprank and downrank feature all the time. Being able to report stuff as AI and get little indicators that a site is AI slop is good.
As an example, serious eats is my go to recipe site, and I've got it tuned so it returns higher in my results.
I also really appreciate I can write my own custom css, and style every box and widget on the page.
And marine most of all, I love that their AI tool will not show up unless you end your query with a "?". Meaning I'm explicitly opting in to using it.
My last reason for liking it is ideological. No ads, no manipulation because of advertising tech. Just ... the stuff I searched for.
I do not like the image search page, however. It feels clunky in a way I can't put my finger on.
There's a few other things I really like, but it's hard to type them all out. So I often go, "kagi is great, love kagi."
Used to be you would trade a yak or a horse for something. Then you could trade little pieces of metal. In the future, why not something smaller? I mean, people are trading virtual things (like an app). Why not something small for something as small as a website view?
I'd argue it's still a product issue, one that will eventually be solved.
The reason a payment is too much friction today is because it's surrounded by a raft of cruft: is there an extra "processing fee", am I signing up for a recurring charge and didn't realize it, I have to enter my card details and address, or I have to log in to some system, I have to OTP with my bank, etc.
It hasn't been solved yet, but someone will solve it to the point that it's a single swipe to buy an article for 25c, and it'll work. I would argue the NYT is in the best position to do so, but they are addicted to their scummy business practices where it's hard to cancel, you pay "$2/mo introductory rate" that suddenly escalates to $40/mo, and so on.
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.
I know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.
The more I think about it, the less sure I am that the model for journalism is actually broken. For some unknown reason, people do not want to subscribe to news media, but they'll happily pay for Netflix, Disney, HBO and Spotify.
The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same.
You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article.
So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway.
So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.
> 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.
It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.
Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong.
I think the majority publishers have tried it in the past 10-15 years.
If you are a publisher, something which gains widespread attention might happen in your region, or an article might become viral for other reasons. You know that a lot of people would like to read that article and not become subscribers. So if you can sell access to an article 50 000 times for 1 dollar, that's $50 000 in income you wouldn't otherwise have.
But unfortunately, very few people are willing to pay a dollar or 50c for an article which they are desperate to read.
> 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.
The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that."
And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.
So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.
> We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.
>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).
> 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.
Thanks for pointing out safereddit and other redlib instances! I had the old.reddit.com redirect configured for Uruky and was devastated that it no longer worked. Updated, cheers!
NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too. Stupid modal popup with "Join the most real place on the internet" (yeah, right) banner that appears after about 20 seconds.
I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break!
(I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choice - these days I post a comment maybe once a week there. I think I may finally be done with Reddit, sadly. It was good while it lasted.)
> NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too.
That'd be an important milestone in enshittification when it comes to other entities that were previously happy to outsource their fan-forums, support, announcement systems, etc. And I do mean "enshittification" in a formal quasi-academic sense, because it's not just about things getting worse, but about the middleman starting to exploit people on either end. Adding a login-wall means that content and communities built up with a kinder kind of collaboration will become hostages, to boost Reddit Corporation's user-stats and creepy data harvesting for investors.
Kind of like how various groups started using Twitter as a way to provide a scalable stream of announcements--sometimes time-critical ones--to an audience. The entire use-case goes down the toilet when users aren't being shown your stuff in chronological order anymore.
I know new reddit has its potential inspiration in stopping LLM scraping(?) but websites are made worsebecause of some stupid metric that has to be fulfilled
What do you feel is missing for a free news offering?
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
> dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). -->
Hey, I remember reading along before and around the time you were “officially” hired – happy Kagi could recognize your work, and seemingly continues to do so :)
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.
> 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 just don’t want an account. I disagree with how they’re running things these days and I just don’t see the point when I only want to read posts, not make them, or comment or vote on them. And the more they push “Make an account! Get the app!” the less likely I am to do it. It’s a really hostile way to treat users. I don’t like most social media and it doesn’t bother me not having accounts on them, but it’s become such a pain with Reddit because it was one of the only places online left to get decent information about specific things. I’m now finding myself searching for things online and finding no answers because Reddit is inaccessible and that’s where the answer tends to be.
They are pretty ban-happy, and generally outright hostile to newly created accounts that try to participate.
I created an account recently after not having one for a couple years. I was banned within 2 weeks. I accidentally connected to my VPN when I had a Reddit page open in a minimized window that I forgot about. I assume that’s what did it. Last I checked, I couldn’t even login with this account anymore.
I don't like assisting reddit's monetization/AI training machine by tying my browsing activity directly to an account identity. I would prefer to browse anonymously and make them work at least a little bit harder to compile my anonymous activity into a coherent single-user profile.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
I'm annoyed mostly because I always surf with private browsing, so I always have to log in again and again. And for some reason I haven't bothered checking, Firefox doesn't save the username field.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would implement this like some kind of token replenishment or quota system like every IP address gets to access old dot like a very low number and if you log in with the same IP address you get more quota or replenished a little faster if you also come in with no auth like from a private window. Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't have to do anything like this but yes, regional is likely as well.
I know I worked with some programmers in India and apparently some ISP will do some kind of trickery so like a lot of customers share the same ipv4 address. So what I said above might not actually make sense in the real world.
Is that trickery NAT, network address translation? It is a pretty widespread technique I think, we’d have run out of ipv4 addresses a while ago without it.
Yes, it is called carrier grade nat but the problem is you can't assume that an IP address maps to a user or even a household neatly. That's the problem.
Wellp, not for me... Shame, reddit has/had really good answers to a variety of problems that I've had over the years. Not sure if there's a replacement for it, or if there will ever be another.
You can still add .json to any thread and get the full comments in a single object. The anti scraping features must be a rate limiting thing, because it’s very machine readable otherwise. They just want to push people to be logged in and use the app.
> Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
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).
I'd be onboard with supporting a local newspaper -- if they hadn't gone all-in with aligning themselves to a particular political tribe. They're part of the problem Ground News makes obvious to a hilarious degree, where if something happens that doesn't fit the narrative you just will never see it if you only look at their platform. Given that not everyone has a reputable local newspaper I don't know that saying "everybody should" is necessarily sound advice.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
should is the key here. The lack of something to support is reason to not pay. Like you, I lack a good local newspaper. There is the nearby city, but they don't cover the important local news well.
Still I'm on the lookout for if someone ever does start covering local news. I don't need national news, even though that is what is cheap easy to get me. (because I get it from to many other places)
There's still valuable info in your local newspaper even if their agenda is the opposite of yours. You just have to read between the lines and phone their bias.
But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
You assume there is one. My 'local' covers high school sports, road construction, but none of the important issues that I need to care about to be an informed voter.
I need someone to be at the library board meeting, school board meeting, city counsel meeting... Some of these happen at the same time so I can't attend them all even if I didn't have other things not mentioned I'm doing then.
You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results.
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
they are reaching out out via normal means.
you don't get to redefine words because you are too cheap to pay for information and only read trash.
its so funny how you idiots gibble about "if you do not pay you are the product" but everything you know about the world is you being the product
Do you think every bit of literature that is old, has no copyright, and in the public realm is trash? I tend to think the opposite actually. Nothing that’s been written in the past 100 years is worth the paper it’s on in my opinion. Maybe you’re the one who’s PAYING to read trash?
Right. I don’t mind paying when the value is clear and I feel like my time has been respected, and paywalled link showing up in search violates the second of those two.
In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.
This sounds a bit odd to me. When I'm hungry, I dont run to McDonald's and expect to be fed for free. I whip out my card, pay for the items, patiently wait for the food to be arrive and then eat.
You could very well argue that why are you making me wait for my food when I'm hungry.
The sibling reply has the right idea. Information and food are very different things, with the former spreading and duplicating every time a human comes in contact with it and often becoming readily available from a wide variety of sources.
To be clear, I have no issue paying for what I find to be quality writing, especially when it brings a novel, well thought out perspective or context. The a large majority of stuff I see turning up in search results is not this, however, especially in recent years. That category is dominated by AI-written growth hacky low info drivel.
By this logic, listings for physical products shouldn't show in search results either, because they're just ads for something you have to pay for.
You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.
This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.
Physical products are different because potential buyers are afforded a bevy of free, easily accessible ways to evaluate the product prior to purchase.
I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.
I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.
Most newspapers/magazines have extremely generous intro offers. NYT offers $4/month! WSJ offers $8/month! You can get a great literary magazine like n+1 with physical issues for $3! These are extremely good deals.
I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.
It’s not just the monetary cost, but also the overhead involved. It’s yet another subscription to have to manage (and eventually jump through hoops to cancel) as well as the friction in the moment of needing to pull out a credit card or sign into PayPal or whatever.
As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.
Prob easier to manage a month’s worth of subscriptions than write a single paragraph of one good article (spoken as someone with a subscription allergy personally!). Darn I feel bad for journalists, almost wish physical newspapers were just about our everything so we paid a few bucks for 1-2 things and felt the products in our hands. I think that status quo was OK for the industry (or maybe journalism has never been a decent business, but seemed OK).
I would be a lot less reticent to try subscriptions if cancellation were always a standard one-click affair. It’d also help if it were the norm for companies of any kind selling subscriptions to notify you before trials, promotional periods, etc are going to end instead of keeping silent and hoping you forget.
Remembering to cancel subscriptions that I wasn’t enthused with and figuring out the mystic ritual required to cancel are types of stress I don’t need any more of.
The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.
I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.
> I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog
I don't like paywalls but this is very silly. You have exactly the same tools to evaluate products and blogs: reviews. You wanna figure out if you should pay for The Information? Go lookup a reddit thread on if it's worth it[1].
Also what "tactics"? Being indexed by a search engine? Nefarious!
I’m not likely to go on a side quest to look up reviews on a site I stumble upon in search of information. There’s a decent likelihood that the nugget I came for is either the only thing I need from the site or the site is something I’d use a small handful of times per year at most.
There’s “tactic” being used here is bait and switch.
The problem with paywalled news articles is that the ranking is done on the full article content, yet I am not allowed to see it. This often outranks the results I am allowed to see. Product pages don't have this problem.
Don't they? An ice cream maker might be highly ranked because of positive reviews from people who used it to make good ice cream, yet clicking through to the product page doesn't let me have ice cream unless I buy the machine!
Product pages don't engage in cloaking or selectively serving a different a different page to the search engine crawler from the one served to the visitor. They are ranked based on the content visible on the page. If that's the best match to my search query, so be it (it probably means I am indeed searching for said product page).
Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.
(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).
I prefer ads because pihole blocks them. Paywalls block me, and then I have to reload and ninja enter reader mode, or if I’m reading inclined, find an archive link.
I think this short exchange highlights the problem really well.
Most people are uninterested in paying for those services, in part because the internet has trained them that information is free and in part because of fairly extreme polarization in opinions that seems to be everywhere.
Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good, but that information was something the news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago, reinforcing the idea that information should be free.
If there going to make money long term, they're going to have to find a new way to monetize. People are actively blocking the ads and don't want to pay for yet another subscription to content they don't access that often.
> news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago
Haven't either ads or paywalls/subscriptions always been the primary way that news companies paid for journalists/sysadmins/servers, etc? What was the funding source 'not that many years ago' if not ads or paywalls/subscriptions?
> Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good
Is arguing such a thing "well and good"? I'm not complaining, but my GP comment merely asking how the other user expected the sites he wants to get content from will pay their costs (as they said ads and paywalls/subscriptions were out) got downvoted - I'm not even sure that goes as far as arguing that people should help pay for content that they want to receive.
Assuming an actual journalist wrote the piece, and it's not some stitch together, half-slop, half-cognitive noise-ridden piece of crap, like, you know, about 80% of all content behind a paywall.
Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month? Maybe you just want the exclusives which even then they often break stuff (at least Gurman on Bloomberg, especially if you care about Apple/OpenAI).
> Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month?
They do! And I did test a subscription to Bloomberg, and subscriptions to various other sites, but I have never found it compelling enough to visit for the price on a regular basis. I get my news from a large variety of sources. I have never found it valuable to only subscribe to one source, and I simply do not have the capital to justify subscribing to all of the places that sometimes publish good articles.
Yes, so does Economist, The Verge and many many other sites.
But I'm interested in maybe 3 articles a month. If I were to pay for them it's like paying for Netflix and watching a movie a month. Or subscribing to a dead-tree newspaper and only reading the comics.
I do get that micropayments are hard, but it's not a technical issue - it never has been. It's all about credit card costs and legalese.
I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
I think that sort of journalism has largely been purged from the traditional sources and has ended up on Substack, or their own site. It's transitioned from "I can trust Brand X" to "I can trust that individual because of their track record and the way they reliably report things that don't align with their own world view", etc. Glenn Greenwald is an example. The story around why he had to depart The Intercept (which he helped found!) is everything that's wrong with modern journalism that has pushed people like Glenn to places like Substack.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
the parent's argument is that those companies don't really do journalism anymore, not the the companies themselves went out of business. they are more like entertainment networks.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
I think there should be more of it. Negatives for the Apple News model is that it's Apple only and there is no ad-free tier. It's also app locked so you can't use ad-blockers.
But yes, something like Apple News with an ad-free tier that works with standard websites. E.g. the participating news sites should recognize whatever service token you have and serve unpaywalled content.
Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
Somebody’s got to be paid to write the basic news articles. Maybe we could have a government funded “basic news” (although there are obvious concerns that that might turn into a propaganda service).
We could call it the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it could directly fund local news stations. It could be a hybrid public/non-profit where the government funds some, members stations fund some, and donations fund the rest.
Member stations could be responsible for more local content and be a part of a network that syndicates content from other stations.
It could cover more than just news though - children's programming, think pieces, deeper dives into government.
Man, that would be great.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
> Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
That’s ok I was already doing the whole “obliquely reference things that already exist in the abstract as if they were a novel idea” bit; you doubling down on it kind of makes it better.
There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.
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.
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.
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.)
I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
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.
>I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
This wouldn't affect your accounts usability or features it would just delink your payment from your account. Same as paying for Mullvad with a giftcard bought on Amazon.
Privacy Pass would decouple each search from the account. I think it’s okay to have as an opt-in thing. But private payments should be the default IMO.
I see. I mispoke with "privacy pass" although it's similar. I meant like a one time break between your payment and account for regular accounts underneath the option to use privacy pass.
I think we’re broadly in agreement: the more private options we have (with different levels of privacy), the better.
It’s possible, in theory, to use Privacy Pass to allow e.g. using credit card to pay for the whole subscription without associating the account with the payment. (E.g. one payment gives you 1 “pass”, and it can be used to extend your account validity for one month.) In practice, it’ll probably be fairly easy to correlate a payment with an account extension, as those would happen almost simultaneously, so a couple more levels are needed here (e.g. doing this through resellers, and maybe breaking up the subscription payment into, say, 30 “day passes” which are used in random order to make it harder to track).
Posteo’s “one-time code system” is a fair bit weaker than Privacy Pass btw: when they get a payment, they can still associate it with your account (so if you’ve paid using, say, bank transfer, they will know your name, and you’ll have to trust them not to store the link). But it can be used together with Privacy Pass :-)
While they don't offer anonymous/private payments, you can use PrivacyPass no matter how you pay for Kagi. So, yes, the fact that you have an account will be known to anyone with access to their subscriber data, but what you search for will not be tied to that identity.
Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement:
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
I wish there was some kind of EFF-curated "privacy/internet freedom" pass that I could buy.
Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.
I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.
The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).
My search engine is a digital product that's already free and private and good and is different to when you give someone your home address to send a package.
I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.
I used to be a Kagi subscriber and I would so like to be one again — but their stubbornness in using Russian data in their indexing, and paying Russian businesses for the data is what is stopping me.
I wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
I similarly stopped subscribing when I realised they were paying money to Musk for grok, and I refuse to fund that man in any way. I hadn't seen the Russian data usage. The Kagi founder above states that using these services doesn't imply support of the governments or owners behind them, but that's a crock of shit. Using their services is, at best, an indicator of a complete lack of principles to a degree that I can now never use their service. He asks for respect for his moral line above, but no-one owes him that - not every viewpoint deserves respect.
Being principled in your choice of services as an individual these days is challenging, as so many companies pursue money over all else. It is doable, however, and Kagi won't feature in my life again no matter how many cool features they add. The internet has become such a cesspit that it warms my heart to know there are still other people who believe in being good and principled, not just making money.
I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions (past, present, or future) of any of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.
edit: I encourage you (and others in similar dilemma) to watch our origin story to see why are we here and what it is that we stand for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE
Unfortunately, paying money to an economy of a country which started and still wages an unprovoked war against another country, killing civilians indiscriminately, is a choice. The only reason you can "focus on building great software" is because you are not in Ukraine, where Russian bombs paid for by the aforementioned Russian economy would be falling on your head.
Not to mention the problematic nature of trusting any data coming from a country known for state-sponsored deception, trolling and organized operations in informational warfare.
(to the inevitable whatabouters: yes, this can also be applied to other economies/countries, everyone makes their own moral choices on where to draw the line, but the line should be drawn somewhere)
I actually do know what it’s like to have bombs falling on my head. I lived in Serbia during the US-led bombing in 1999. I continued using US company products during and afterward, and eventually moved to the United States, while many of my fellow countrymen drew a line similar to yours. I never felt that companies or individuals elsewhere owed me a boycott on my behalf. That experience shaped my reluctance to treat commercial relationships as endorsements of governments or their actions.
I acknowledge everyone draws their own moral line. I respect where you’ve drawn yours, and I ask for the same consideration in return. I don’t think either of us is going to change the other’s mind, so I’ll leave it here. I genuinely appreciate that you care enough about Kagi to have this conversation.
Writing as an internet rando (to another?): please don't make such comments.
Phrasing it as "X deserved to be bombed" is needlessly inflammatory. I agree that something had to be done and that given the choice between inaction like in Bosnia and the NATO intervention like we for Kosovo, I'd easily pick the latter. It's even plausible that the NATO intervention was close to the best that could be done and any harm was a "necessary evil". However, saying that the civilian population of the undemocratic Yugoslav state deserved to have their lives disrupted by being bombed (or worse??) is just cruel.
I don't think your comment will convince the previous poster or (most importantly) unrelated third parties.
(For the record: the implicit comparison between the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the NATO intervention in Serbia, by the previous poster _is_ IMO deeply dismaying.)
If the option existed to remove various sources for search results (for me, Yandex, and hopefully any payment to them) existed, I’d be back.
I was more tolerant of my money going to US companies when I first tried Kagi, but my views have shifted a lot in the last year or so.
US actions have shifted in recent times, and it’s just foolish belligerence now. There was a bit of nuance in the past but at present it doesn’t even serve US interests.
> Not to mention the problematic nature of trusting any data coming from a country known for state-sponsored deception, trolling and organized operations in informational warfare.
What, like the United States of America?
I find it so odd that people think Kagi's commercial agreement with Yandex is more offensive than theirs with Google or Microsoft, both of whom have contracts with the US military. Surely they're equally as abhorrent, particularly the use of their AI models for combat warfare purposes.
> (to the inevitable whatabouters: yes, this can also be applied to other economies/countries, everyone makes their own moral choices on where to draw the line, but the line should be drawn somewhere)
Genuinely curious: on the correct side of your personal line, what services do you now use that replace Kagi? Presumably they'd be EU-based, like Qwant or Ecosia?
I wish there were a way to use my Kagi subscription with ChatGPT/Claude. I can't switch completely to Kagi Assistant right now as it doesn't have feature parity and the subscriptions with OpenAI/Claude are good value. Paying for API credits in addition to my Kagi subscription seems steep.
This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
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.
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.
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.
Kagi also offers Kagi Assistant, which seems to harness models to apply a search-first behavior, and tends to produce higher-quality results for information that would not normally be within a given model's training data. While the cheaper Kagi plans don't offer the full slate of frontier models, I've found that Kimi models in Kagi Assistant are generally excellent for discovering information, even if I may then go to Claude or Gemini frontier models to parse what I've found.
Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)
I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is.
While this is a nice feature, needing an account (nevermind paying) to then only get a meta search engine will prevent me from ever using it.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
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.
They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search.
Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.
Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
I really like the direction Kagi is taking here. It feels like theyre' building the product around how people actually use it rather than chasing every new AI trend
Shoutout StopTheMadness for allowing me to redirect one of the defaults as I see fit (URL redirects), even add a !k bang to DuckDuckGo via regex.
The actual 2026 iOS Safari search options… this is what Apple’s trillions want to offer (well maybe want to offer only the first one) and absolutely nothing more:
Happy Kagi ultimate user here too from jp. Only I d like to know more about their indexing. This was the primary reason I sw. to Kagi but it seems Kagi is not doing much indexing by itself.
I wish Kagi had existed years ago. I just saw someone talking about the Google SEO-laden experience when troubleshooting coding errors and realized it’s a pain I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s telling that Google never made a “remove this site from results” option. Their incentives weren’t set up to provide the best user experience.
This is what we really need and others should focus on this, niche settings for AI implementations. We are already tired of seeing the same stuff come up again and again when using AI. This is the type of stuff that can make AI more enjoyable and useful
I love Kagi so much. What an incredibly thoughtful, fast, powerful, customizable search tool. I love that I can filter-out / rank / save search tools, and their focus on speed & execution makes it deeply worth a few bucks a month.
I've been building my own metasearch engine after using Kagi for a long while and I must say that my results are getting better even than theirs.
Kagi can do things at their scale that are not feasible for me right now and one of them is categorising links like they probably do for this feature. So it is inspiring. A route that might work is checking if there are ublock lists that keep track of paywalled sites.
I've also been looking into creating my own search index, but this is a huge undertaking. I might go the tiny index route like Marginalia has done and try to find a niche for my specific use cases.
Another route could be to categorise websites better automatically and build up a category index.
The thing that bothers me about most paywalls is that they want you to take a subscription to remove it. I've got more than enough subscriptions in my life.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each.
Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world.
The app isn't great, but the price is right.
Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link.
If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.
I have hundreds of pdfs of books, and a thousand dollar library (my friends call it) We have to keep this stuff. This isn't the first time we've lost our books. It happens every 80 or so years
I can still read most paywalled articles by either blocking JS or digging into the HTML source code. I wish the browser could handle this issue by wgetting the source and decoding it without giving away any information about the visitor
Would the biggest impact of this be for things like news sources? I guess the idea is that ads are preferrable, as ads and paywalls seem to be two of the primary existing ways that such places support themselves (or don't)?
Are we talking a company rewording reporting that a different news company hired 1 or more journalists, etc. to originally report? And in this example, are the sites "free" because ads are enabled?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here
uh, I did not know: what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround... (many thanks to them)
>what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround.
right. there is no requirement that the submitter provides the workaround themselves.
the requirement is that a workaround exists. sometimes nice commenters will provide the workaround, but again, the only requirement is that it is possible to workaround the paywall.
Interesting! This is something a couple of customers have requested for Uruky (co-founder here), among the highlight/removal of "AI Slop" and "Malicious URLs", but I honestly never thought it would be widely wanted. I guess we're wrong and we might add that soon. Does anyone know of a good (and free as in freedom) source/list for such URLs? They didn't seem to mention any.
I love Kagi. I want to see them do well, of all of the search alternatives, this is the only one where I’ve never felt the need to go back to google.
I was setting a up a new computer the other day and got confused that the first three links for a search were ads, then I remembered it was google and they hide the things you’re looking for.
Site priority, lenses and the slop filter are all icing on the cake.
With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.
Paywalls differ by the difficulty of circumventing them - for NYT/WaPo paywalls it's enough to delete cookies for domain, for WSJ/FT you have to use archive.is, and surely there are paywalls with no known workarounds too.
I hate that our solution to the modern Internet is to engage in technical warfare just to make it usable. Will someone invent a new pay-to-play Internet that does not engage in warfare against its own users?
Everyone hate paywalls, ads, and aggregators. So what business models are even left? Are we just going to have patron supported echo chambers and propaganda from now on?
I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far.
An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie
The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.
Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
I believe Kagi has been annotating paywalled results with a circled dollar sign for some time.
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
I use Brave Search+ DuckDuckGo+ Google Image search and that seems to sastify my search requirements while keeping my payment info private.
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
How about a setting that removes Cloudflare captcha blocked links from search results? Or let me define a profile of good/bad website practices (recipe blogspam, paywall, captchas, etc) and autodown/up rank for me.
This needs to have a whitelist feature, as I am a paying subscriber to a few well known paywalled news sites that I will use Kagi search to find years old articles. But I would like sites I don't subscribe to to be excluded.
Paywalls fucking suck. No I'm not going to subscribe to your publication just so I can read one fucking article. I would however pay 5-10 dollars a month to get access to a variety of news sites (ad free of course - albeit less of a problem using a real browser with UBO). No such service existed the last time I checked, but it doesn't feel like much of a leap for a paid service like Kagi to facilitate.
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.
I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.
You'd guess wrong, because modern Yandex is essentially Kremlin owned, so it is directly supporting it, not in a huge amount (on account of Kagi being relatively tiny company), but definitely not 'none'.
Also in the discussions about removal or at least asking to make it toggle-able, so users can make sure their requests and money are not forwarded to Russia have been shut off and ridiculed (including staff member saying "our views on the war differ" whatever that meant.
I think this is amazing. Love Kagi. I’m happy to pay for a good search.
Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data. I prefer it to Claude or any other, because it actually answers the question I need without fluff or “Great question! Here’s some plausible nonsense you can trip over instead of doing actual research!”.
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).
I find it to be hit-and-miss, but overall more useful than not. What I like most is its relative brevity, and the response often helps me find a better prompt to ask so that's good. It's also really fast which I appreciate.
I guess I should mention that I'm using the deep research assistant, not the quick one.
I wouldn't say it's better, it's a great alternative though. I find that for some tasks I much prefer doing a search myself as I may not trust the sources it's pulling from, but for others it's not only adequate but much faster.
I think it's a great complement to human lead search.
"Able to find things that regular search cannot" is pretty much the value-add for AI in Google as well. The blue links are becoming less and less helpful.
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.
> 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.
Unfortunately, that is nothing new. A big part of the reason why Google gained popularity, and maintained it for so long, was its resistance to SEO stuffed, spammy articles. The spammers continued escalating things, and now it pretty much takes AI to avoid their garbage.
The new part is AI makes it much easier and cheaper to produce garbage than ever before. So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
> So the ratio of garbage to non-garbage has been increasing rapidly.
Is it actually, really? Even late 90s most stuff was garbage, and been like that for as long as I've been on the internet, or maybe I've just always been jaded. But the ratio of "garbage to non-garbage" seems constant for as long as I can remember, multiple decades at this point. The tools for finding the signal through the noise have changed over time though.
It's also all over YouTube.
I'm not sure AI fully dodges it either. I've asked questions like "best [cuisine] in [place]" and the AI answers with a truly mediocre restaurant that has an amazing website.
Probably true. That said, I spend most of my time querying LLMs for more objective and less financially motivated information. The only time I ask for recommendations is for new routes to explore by bike, and even then it will adapt if you tell it why a route is bad.
I suspect that product and service recommendations will be a near impossible problem to solve. Any time there is a potential for financial gain, someone will figure out how to game the system. Even if it could be resolved, the queries would have to focus on objective criteria ("best" is too subjective).
Sure, we can't all agree on "the best tacos in San Diego" but we all know the answer isn't Taco Bell.
But then once you get shit results, don't you iterate on the prompt and try again? In this case, add what you actually care about, not just "best cuisine" which can mean a lot of things, and also straight up tell it to not focus on the website or whatever, then eventually you'll get somewhat reasonable and applicable results.
Nope--I was on vacation, walked to the place, and saw it looked like a disaster, but then everyone was hungry and we were already out and about. Too late for more research. I picked a place the old-fashioned way, by walking around and seeing what was nearby. We did fine.
I think the problem is Google stopped prioritizing search quality and instead let ads and now AI content dominate their search.
But it is new. We have clearly crossed a threshold, and we know when it happened: https://www.wheresyoured.at/the-men-who-killed-google/
Google was not the first search engine, and it certainly isn't the first search engine to fall from grace.
There is basically only before and after Google. No search engine was ever as important to the Internet. It’s basically a pillar of what we have now.
I remember people using Yahoo and AltaVista a lot. And before gmail everyone had a yahoo email (if they didn't already have a hotmail). Times change, kings fall from grace.
Google has been the dominant force for about 80% of the internet’s existence. I understand things come and go, but Google is incredibly unique. Their importance cannot be overstated
Ironic, isn't it? Same here.
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
I thought the Kagi API was entirely pay-as-you-go.
EDIT: I see I have $5 of "pre-paid API credit". Is this a one-time thing or is that included with my plan?
I also see $5 API credits. I would also like to know if this is part of my $10 subscription each month.
Edit: this is a one-time promotional credit. One must pay for credits thereafter, in addition to their subscription.
I also confirm the $5 you get is only promotional credit.
I tested on my local LLM chat via Open WebUI, 2 requests from that cost $0.02 (so $4.98 left), and after my monthly Kagi renewal an hour ago, it did not reset, I am still on $4.98.
You are probably better off using Kagi Assistant anyways, as you get $10 there on the $10 Professional plan.
For local LLM web searches, to save on cost I will stick with the Brave Search API which gives you $5 free every month.
they recently made some changes from their v0 API to this new v1 with a more complicated model
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.
You know now that I think of it me too. I absolutely never used the free google one because I never trusted it (you know what they say about free things).
If I'm paying for it through Kagi, I could at least trust their incentives are aligned with mine instead of whoever is paying them the most.
Google shopping is a great tool to use when you don't care if the items are truly in stock or are sold at the price listed.
Yeah, I’d like this too. It’s one of the only things I still miss from Google.
> If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
Why?
i am not sure i understand your question.
presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop, and otherwise find Kagi has all of the features they want
> presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop
Right... why? Is it really too much after talking to the assistant and finding the item you want to purchase, to then click the provided link to the product page and click buy?
My assumption is something like the google shopping feature. This shows the product you're looking for at all available sites in your country so you can purchase the cheapest one.
I've been using Kagi assistant for this for quite a while. I just run a query with some variation of "Compile a list of online stores with shipping+price, sorted by the average user review score of the entire site, sub-sorted by price where I can buy $foobar?" sometimes I have to give it another push to tell it options or where to look, but this works pretty well for comparison shopping.
LLMs are not magic, nor are they gonna crawl some dozens of websites, they work with search results they are provided with, and thus they need good search results to work with. Maybe in the US or sth it is better, but where I live finding good shopping results from local shops/websites is not straightforward. Google shopping, that I just now checked, seems much better with querries that I struggled with kagi. Typically, in order to find things I need I usually run searches on local price aggregators than kagi, though it is not perfect because they do not include shops that don't want to pay them, and their search features are not great either. But running kagi for local search shopping results ime is not great, and similarly the assistant do not provide great results either.
I do not want a click-to-buy button, I want kind of lens that is specialised for shopping within specific regions (the current kagi lenses allow only 10 sites which is not really enough for shopping).
> nor are they gonna crawl some dozens of websites
That is quite literally what !research does.
But agreed on local search - I tend to use Google maps for anything local. Otherwise for something I'd buy online, ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I meant, they are not gonna start from scratch by crawling websites, they are gonna rely on the search results to grab content of relevant results. I think this is what research does, in a higher quantity.
In contrast, I may start with a page in a website and start going around looking for related products etc. The assistant is not gonna start doing that (I think at least), it just gonna get the page provided by the search results. For this reason, what search results it is provided with is important.
I am also (mostly) buying online, but for certain reasons I want to buy from domestic websites rather than ones based in other countries, if possible. Kagi has not been great at providing great results for that.
I’m guessing because it’s valuable to have a trustworthy AI assistant that you can just explain what you want and it finds the best options
Keyword trustworthy, I think Kagi is one of the only companies that would be in a position to do this without pushback.
But, regular models and harnesses work okay for this too. You just have to specify “web search”, very important.
Care to share your setup?
I use pi and librechat and I am really limited by the lack of proper web connector. Testing Tavily right now, Kagi is next.
I wonder why I see so few comments about it on HN, does everybody have this figured out already? Am I a dummy? Am I severely overstating how important of a frature web access and search is for LLM use?
I use Claude code for basically everything, since the harness is pretty complete. The online chat interface works fine too. For basic research I downgrade the model and effort. Smarter models are good at knowing when to web search rather than guess, but you should always specify “do a web search”.
The one caveat is opus has an absolutely awful voice. The way it writes is annoying and verbose. Sonnet actually works better for this type of thing.
That's already possible, so I thought they were asking for more.
Find a product/vendor with known quality, at lowest price. Like Amazon ~15 years ago
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.
> Traditional search days are really numbered.
There is a lot that agents can help with wrt search, but they also have a lot of blind spots. They work well many times, but then there are times where I find stuff that multiple llms missed. Imo this is gonna work as in many other domains, as in the more different tools one is proficient with (searching with llms, searching traditionally etc) the more successfully one solves problems.
Funny how that works out, because AI is the solution to a problem significantly worsened by AI. The web didn't used to be this terrible before chatGPT, now it's just so much slop. At this point AI is required to sift through all the bullshit caused at least in part by AI.
Eh I feel like search results have been pretty bad for years. SEO and fake page link farms ruined it.
ChatGPT is trained on all of Reddit and internet forums where most of the useful info is. It just automates the drudgery.
Kagi's translation is absolutely top notch. I used it for a few things and while Google's, even Gemini, got some context, kagi's caught the spirit of the text perfectly.
It's that good because the language model they use is expensive I'm pretty sure. I haven't seen many details on what they use, but it's apparently a loss leader for them and already can no longer be used for free.
Meanwhile google translate is probably served on the cheapest model they could muster.
I made (vibed) an extension for pi that wraps their search and extract APIs.
The assistant is still good and I also use it regularly. It’s also nice to not have to leave the terminal sometimes.
https://github.com/themauveavenger/pi-kagi
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.
I probably put !expert in half my searches and rely on Kagi for most of my research that isn't just agent context gathering (and a fair amount of what _is_ just context gathering). It's excellent and cites good sources.
Last time I compared them, it was actually ChatGPT that provided a similarly good search experience, especially compared to Claude. OpenAI doesn't meter its regular chat experience by token usage (yet), so I don't have to ration the better model and just leave it on Thinking High. The end result has definitely been better than what I got from the same queries in Claude or Gemini, and I suspect this isn't just about differences between the models, but also about the way search is integrated into their end-user chat apps.
This is honestly also one of the reasons why I don't subscribe to Kagi anymore. My 'Google-Fu', combined with whatever personalization is happening on my account, already keeps Google's search results in a similarly useful state to Kagi's, so Google and ChatGPT already cover my needs.
Paying for Kagi Ultimate feels like a privacy upgrade but a quality sidegrade that isn't worth $270 a year.
I have Kagi and ChatGPT subs and would agree ChatGPT is the better offering. But you can use Luna with Kagi Assistant on the cheap plan which works pretty well too
I became so annoyed by google's ai overview and front page results that I am using 99% duckduckgo as the least bad free alternative for the other leg from my chatgpt usage in this context.
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.
Yes, I use AI assistant a lot. I copy the agent definition from Geir Isene to a custom assistant, it works nicely. In my experience, Kimi K2.6 reasoning works best.
https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...
> They somehow harnessed it so that it mainly searches info first and sticks to the verifiable data.
I like this too, but it isn't as bulletproof as it sounds. I've run into two instances in the past week where it confidently gave me wrong information, because it ran into a search result that had wrong information, and it trusted that information.
You could perhaps say that's fine; if you were doing the search yourself, you'd get the same results and might trust the wrong information too. But the "might" there is... oh boy, I'm gonna say it... load-bearing: someone is much more likely to believe the confident LLM response than if they were looking directly at the primary source, along with search results with other sources that might contradict it.
I just wish it were easier to keep up with which models are good for what. Especially with the introduction of the research assistant, I have no idea whether I should be using that or one of the standalone models. And don't even get me started on trying to pick the best open model, it's always fluctuating.
I often try 2 different models with the same prompt in case one misses anything. But most of the times I do not see much difference. Newer models do not seem to improve search that much, so I do not think you have to stress too much about new models etc. In general I stick with kimi 2.6 reasoning because it is very very cheap and does thorough searching. I do not see much gains with using more expensive models like opus etc, so I prefer to use multiple cheaper, open models simultaneously except for "harder" queries. The advantage of the cheaper open models is that you can prompt 2-3 of them and if you see the results unsatisfactory you can retry with more expensive ones. And ime sometimes models that are not talked much, like gemini pro, perform quite good.
I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.
I remember at the time they were working on it a lot of people (honestly, including me) were pretty critical of them "wasting" their limited resources on AI stuff. We saw it as being sort of similar to the t-shirt drama [1].
I'm here to admit I was wrong, it's incredibly useful. It misses the mark frequently, like any LLM, but it's well annotated with footnotes that link to the original material.
I use it all the time.
I also love how easy it is to use or not - just add a question mark to the end of your query to use the AI, or leave it off for traditional search.
With that UX it doesn't feel like it's being shoved down my throat.
[1] https://blog.kagi.com/celebrating-20k
Feels nice to read this, thank you.
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 do like that it tends to reword your search query into the way you meant but couldn’t find the right words in your head.
> "Nobody speaks about their AI Assistant, but it is really good. "
which model?
Deepseek v4 Flash and OpenAi GPT 5.6 Luna are on their free plan, which is fab. I'm not sure more is needed, for web searching.
I find Kim best. I used 4.5, now 4.6 reasoning.
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.
What do you do to get the stickers?!
I think the first time around they were included with the free shirt they sent out. Second time they were with the free socks. Maybe general merch store orders might include them too.
For some reason I never received any stickers, shirts, or socks here in France.
I do remember them asking about shipping information at some point though.
They sent out emails where you had to put in the order, IIRC $5 shipping so not entirely free. Maybe it was limited to early subscribers or something.
i also want stickers...
I was subscribed to Kagi for a while but cancelled because there was no subscription for JUST search that didn't include their inferior AI assistant. Why am I paying for it?
If you compare the Professional plan (unlimited searches), to the API, you could justify that the extra AI cost is negligable if you are heavy user. The API costs $12 per 1000 searches, so 1.2¢ per individual search. 10/0.0012≈833.33. At 834 searches or more you would not be paying for the AI features. Obviously, this is only a comparison to the API, which might not have all special Kagi features.
But if you're using the starter plan, which is 300 searches for $5, then you definitely do pay for the assistant. The API cost would be $3.60.
Is it actually good, like 2006 good? Can I go to page 300 rabbit hole and find some obscure website nobody knows with interesting content on the topic I am researching?
Unfortunately, those days might be good no matter what - a lot of those sites have disappeared with their hosting platforms (e.g Geocities). That said, I have been able to find them on Kagi with a bit of effort.
Kagi also has a Small Web feature which is meant to surface exactly that sort of thing. It's not amazing, but I appreciate it existing. I think you can get a "random small web page" kind of thing even without a subscription here: https://kagi.com/smallweb/
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!
I get that this is an option, but what it really shows to me is how broken the model for journalism is. In my view you almost always only get good-quality journalism if you pay for it. (Somehow - e.g. the BBC is paid for by the licence fee, although I'm a bit despairing at the quality of the BBC these days, but perhaps that tracks the significant cuts to their budget...) 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. We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
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.
That's not how a micropayments system would work, and you don't need a token system.
It would work similarly to how my transit card works. I use a credit card to put some amount of money on the card itself, say $20, and then every time I use transit, the payment system just deducts $2.85 from my balance. Once my balance goes below a threshold I set, it charges my card again to top up the balance.
So instead of seven $2.85 charges, there's one $20 charge.
A micropayments system would charge you that $20 once, and then deduct 20¢ from your balance every time you read an article. For 100 articles, you've charged the card only once.
It would work similarly on the website side: the micropayments platform wouldn't send a deposit over to the website owner every single time a visitor paid 20¢; it would aggregate payments and either pay out on a timed schedule, or when some minimum dollar amount is reached.
You don't need a token system for this; denominating the "wallet" balance in dollars (or whatever the user's currency is) is fine. A token system might be useful in order to make pricing easier from the website operator's side, but IMO they suck because they hide the actual amount of money the user is paying. It sort of like when you visit a foreign country where you're not familiar with the currency, and so you see that something costs 1,000,000 foobits, and it has no meaning to you, because the exchange rate with your own currency is something like 1:4285.
Whatever the solution is they'd better get to it because I'm not going to subscribe to every site that wants 20/month just because it shows once on HN or in search results.
Your comment illustrates the tension very well, I think. Businesses don't generally want customers who aren't their core market; those people though, often want one slice of a business's offerings. This can lead to big distractions for businesses, as putting in the effort to serve the wrong market is a waste of time. The publishing industry really fell for this when the internet became widespread; they dreamed of huge audiences and big ad numbers. Turns out, that was not a model that worked, at all. The model that works is focusing on serving a niche, and charging a subscription fee, so you can get predictable revenue.
> so you can get predictable revenue
That for some reason makes me think of those sites where you can insta subscribe online but you need to call and wait on hold for 6 hours to cancel :)
You know what's missing from this model? Back a million years ago when we all had pet dinosaurs, you could pay for a magazine issue on the street if it seemed interesting. And maybe if you found enough issues interesting you subscribed.
Where's that issue you can try out now?
The only way that will work is if each publisher has their own token system, otherwise you have created a new middleman who will want to take their own cut. That middleman will also have to deal with similar problems as payment processors, such as fraud. Perhaps it will be to a lesser degree, because it would be a less valuable target, but it would still add to costs.
Then you run into all sorts of other problems. How do you price articles? I remember running into academic publishers charging the same for a 1 page editorial as a legitimate scientific paper. And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views? If it is the latter, how do you ensure the buyer doesn't lose access? On top of all of that, how do you avoid incentivizing the wrong things? A 1 token article may be 10 times more popular than a 5 token article and cost 1/10th to write, but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half. On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
But the biggest reason why it won't work is because publishers don't want it to work. They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here.
> How do you price articles?
The same way anything else in life is priced: you price at whatever the market can bear.
> And how do you charge for the article? Is it 1 token per view or 1 token for unlimited views?
Also precedent there: online video rental/"purchase". You can decide what model you like better, and see if people want to pay what you ask. You can even offer both, just as is the case for many videos on Amazon, for example.
> but adjust the price of the 5 token article to 10 tokens and you may cut the readership in half.
Yes, that's one of the pitfalls of setting pricing, that every business has to deal with. Note that this problem is present with the monthly subscription model too: half of New York Times subscribers might cancel if the subscription price doubled.
That's a general problem with pricing: determining how much you can raise your price without losing an equivalent (or greater) amount of revenue due to losing customers.
(As an aside, sometimes doubling your prices and exactly halving your customer base is desirable. Fewer customers to deal with at the same overall revenue level might be a net positive. But of course losing a single customer then becomes twice as bad as losing a single customer at the previous pricing.)
> On top of all of that, the consumer probably doesn't want the cognitive burden of keeping track of all of this stuff.
This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.
> They have demonstrated time and time again that they would rather sell monthly subscriptions than access to articles.
Yup. Recurring subscription revenue is stable and predictable; one-time per-article revenue is not.
> Of course they'll take their own cut, but that's fine. We accept (sometimes grudgingly) that credit card issuers and networks get their own cut, so there's easy precedent here.
In that case, I fail to understand the benefits of using a token system over a credit card. The publisher is loosing a cut to another third party. The consumer is dealing with an extra layer of complexity, and paying more to offset the cost to the publisher.
> This is the real issue from the consumer side. People like all-you-can-eat plans. They would much rather make a payment decision once, and then get "free" articles to read on an ongoing basis, than have to make a payment decision for every single article they think they might want to read.
Do you blame the consumer? Not only do they have to decide whether the article is worth reading, they have to do so sight unseen. While there are some who simply want all-you-can-eat plans, there are plenty who would be happy to pay by the article if they knew the article was digestable (at least in cases where it would be cheaper to buy one article they are interested in, rather than for a month at the buffet table).
Stablecoins are a pretty clean solution to this. Negligible fee, sub-cent transactions supported, no need for kyc when paying. Fill up your browser periodically, and pay from an embedded wallet.
Lots of smart people have tried to implement micropayments like this, and it has never worked.
Publishers would rather have the chance at $10 than give up the chance at $10 for 10c. And readers don’t want to be thinking about their credit balance every time they read an article.
Isn't this what Brave tried to push? You get their Basic Attention Token crypto
No, the biggest problem with micropayments is that they just don't match the needs of publishers. At all.
They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.
It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies. I'd love to have a pre-minted ZKP USD style coin. Uncle Sam can take a small transaction fee as consumption tax, people can get wallets as they please. Fully private, semi-decentralized (you don't need full for a government currency), and gov even gets to "tax" transactions on illegal goods (Al Capone). But the two major flaws are that kinda kills a lot of the CC company businesses and it's not great for a country that wants to spy on its citizens. On the flip side, my nightmare is they implement that same system without the ZKP and now your grandma giving you lunch money gets tracked. Weirdly we want with grifting instead. Weird move...
> It's a real shame the grifters took over cryptocurrencies.
We still have Monero. Here's some recent projects.
https://donatemonero.org/
https://monerostats.org/
https://monero.forum/ notice zero posts on the first page about USD price besides one disparaging Bitcoiners for caring about USD price.
Everyone knows about Monero. If someone doesn't we can count on someone ensuring we do. But I can say with certainty that anyone who knows what a ZKP is knows about Monero even though Monero doesn't use ZKPs
Each card transaction comes with the ability for the buyer to do a chargeback. How would you price this feature, if not per transaction?
The solution here is a government operated utility that works like cash to reduce transaction costs, by not having the protections a card transaction has.
> 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!"
Couldn't agree more. I don't know how others perceive it, but I find myself becoming more and more wary of broad endorsement. Maybe it's the amount of astroturfing you see on the internet, but I can't help imagine if there is a concerted effort behind it. When someone shares something meaningful and insightful about a product, there's no better endorsement of it. But low effort platitudes are probably doing more harm than intended.
I get the same feeling with this sort of thing. I did try Kagi and stuck with it for the last year. It's pretty good, but not without it's faults.
- Out of the box, search result quality is comparable to Google
- Search is slow. Latency for most queries is about a second. Sometimes 3 seconds. Google is shockingly fast in comparison.
- Personalized results is a killer feature (blocking, boosting and suppressing domains)
- There is no iOS app. Only one in beta that is seemingly abandoned.
- Their site/app design is just passable at best
- Their AI quick answers give solid answers and are pretty concise
What if it's genuine?
I use kagi. The results quality is pretty good, but I probably use the uprank and downrank feature all the time. Being able to report stuff as AI and get little indicators that a site is AI slop is good.
As an example, serious eats is my go to recipe site, and I've got it tuned so it returns higher in my results.
I also really appreciate I can write my own custom css, and style every box and widget on the page.
And marine most of all, I love that their AI tool will not show up unless you end your query with a "?". Meaning I'm explicitly opting in to using it.
My last reason for liking it is ideological. No ads, no manipulation because of advertising tech. Just ... the stuff I searched for.
I do not like the image search page, however. It feels clunky in a way I can't put my finger on.
There's a few other things I really like, but it's hard to type them all out. So I often go, "kagi is great, love kagi."
Micropayments never work. It's too much friction for the median user to decide if they want to spend a quarter on an article.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...
Used to be you would trade a yak or a horse for something. Then you could trade little pieces of metal. In the future, why not something smaller? I mean, people are trading virtual things (like an app). Why not something small for something as small as a website view?
Look at the paper. There's a floor to mental work. Even if it's a nickel, having to make that decision is enough friction to kill the whole deal
But we charge for tokens, and sites like youtube and spotify reward in collected chunks.
I'd argue it's still a product issue, one that will eventually be solved.
The reason a payment is too much friction today is because it's surrounded by a raft of cruft: is there an extra "processing fee", am I signing up for a recurring charge and didn't realize it, I have to enter my card details and address, or I have to log in to some system, I have to OTP with my bank, etc.
It hasn't been solved yet, but someone will solve it to the point that it's a single swipe to buy an article for 25c, and it'll work. I would argue the NYT is in the best position to do so, but they are addicted to their scummy business practices where it's hard to cancel, you pay "$2/mo introductory rate" that suddenly escalates to $40/mo, and so on.
I could see Substack taking a crack at it also.
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 know what you mean, but it comes across - even to me, a paying customer who does really like Kagi - a bit like talking to someone involved in an MLM who can't wait to steer the conversation around to their product. I'd just prefer discussions to stay somewhat on topic. There's something interesting in this announcement in that, in my view, it deliberately omits an attribute that's a mild proxy for high-quality journalism, and I always find it a shame when the topic at hand is drowned out by generic boosterism.
The more I think about it, the less sure I am that the model for journalism is actually broken. For some unknown reason, people do not want to subscribe to news media, but they'll happily pay for Netflix, Disney, HBO and Spotify.
The comment is always: I want to be able to pay for this one article, but streaming doesn't work like that. I can watch a movie on Netflix and pay €25 per month, then watch what ever else I want. Or, I can pay €13 and watch just that one movie on AppleTV and nothing else. Newspapers are more expensive, typically, because their subscriber count is way lower than that of Netflix, but their cost remain roughly the same.
You can't say: I want to pay $1 for an article, unless that article is massively popular, that's not going to cover all the other less popular, but important news for that day. Journalism requires a stable income to produce things of value. Investigations may that months or years. Using the cost of the Netflix/AppleTV example you should either subscribe, or pay around half the monthly subscription per article.
So no, the revenue model for journalism isn't broken. Our ability so recognize the value of good journalism is. It's easier and more profitable to write an "article" about Kim Kardashians oatmeal with a few dusin ads slapped on, than it is to do a multiple page article about the governance problems of the UK, which you need to sell, because advertisers don't want to be associated with politics and the target audience big enough anyway.
So, we can't have good, independent journalism, because the amount of people who care aren't enough to cover the expense or they want to shop around and only pay for the topics and views they care about and agree with. Micro-payments is the complete wrong way to go, we need more people to start subscribing to newspapers again and the papers needs to take that money and funnel that money directly into actual journalism.
> 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.
It has been tried e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle but it just doesn't work, even a tiny fee will already deter most people from "buying" an article as it will always feel as a loss. Whereas with a subscription you don't feel bad in the moment for losing money but feel good for using your already paid subscription.
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.
Publishers want them and many have tried. It is the other way around, people don't want to make micro payments. Some say they do, but the evidence proves they're wrong.
Edit: Typo
Would AI tokens count as a kind of prepaid micropayment?
Why would any publisher want them? Who exactly tried?
As a publisher, I'd want consistent subscription revenue. The goal is to convince users to pay after they hit the paywall several times.
I think the majority publishers have tried it in the past 10-15 years.
If you are a publisher, something which gains widespread attention might happen in your region, or an article might become viral for other reasons. You know that a lot of people would like to read that article and not become subscribers. So if you can sell access to an article 50 000 times for 1 dollar, that's $50 000 in income you wouldn't otherwise have.
But unfortunately, very few people are willing to pay a dollar or 50c for an article which they are desperate to read.
> 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 can block Apple News ads with DNS-level adblockers. Still works, for now...
The foregone conclusion is that journalism is somehow helpful or valuable to me. I have never read a piece of journalism or "news" and thought to myself, "Wow, how useful! I'm so glad I consumed that."
And I sat here struggling for 5 minutes to think of a single instance. I couldn't come up with one.
So maybe the underlying problem is that journalism isn't nearly as valuable as it thinks it should be.
> We can't even agree on a single setting that says you don't want advertising cookies!
We can't, because the website owners don't want one. They want there to be no standard, because then it's more likely that some people will accidentally allow them.
>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).
I subscribed to https://the-fence.com/ last year and it's been superb.
Almost no publisher wants micropayments. Full stop. Micropayments are simply not good business.
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.
I've been enjoying Kagi for the last couple years.
Even as LLMs slurp up most of the internet and replace search I think Kagi is still useful.
Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account and the ability to filter out stuff like that is useful.
Alternatively, you can configure Kagi to rewrite Reddit links to point to an alternative front-end via https://kagi.com/settings/redirects
EDIT: See here for a list of instances: https://github.com/redlib-org/redlib#instancesI had Kagi configured to rewrite links old.reddit.com. Looks like I need to update it.
Edit: Actually I think this was part of their documentation to explain the intended use of that feature. Too bad this will now no longer work!
(https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html, see example 1)
LibRedirect is useful for this (and other sites) too if you want it to apply over the whole browser.
Friends send me links to reddit and stuff so it's handy to have an automatic redirect.
Wow, thank you. I never know this. I feel good now, in a strange way when a paid service serve me well instead of exploiting me.
Thanks for pointing out safereddit and other redlib instances! I had the old.reddit.com redirect configured for Uruky and was devastated that it no longer worked. Updated, cheers!
Super nice. Good reminder to donate to my favorite instance host, thanks.
NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too. Stupid modal popup with "Join the most real place on the internet" (yeah, right) banner that appears after about 20 seconds.
I'm not logging in to my private account from a work machine that's MITMd for "security", just to browse search results or take a short break!
(I've been a user for nearly 21 years, but using it less and less with each stupid choice - these days I post a comment maybe once a week there. I think I may finally be done with Reddit, sadly. It was good while it lasted.)
> NEW Reddit has recently started blocking logged-out access too.
That'd be an important milestone in enshittification when it comes to other entities that were previously happy to outsource their fan-forums, support, announcement systems, etc. And I do mean "enshittification" in a formal quasi-academic sense, because it's not just about things getting worse, but about the middleman starting to exploit people on either end. Adding a login-wall means that content and communities built up with a kinder kind of collaboration will become hostages, to boost Reddit Corporation's user-stats and creepy data harvesting for investors.
Kind of like how various groups started using Twitter as a way to provide a scalable stream of announcements--sometimes time-critical ones--to an audience. The entire use-case goes down the toilet when users aren't being shown your stuff in chronological order anymore.
> user stats
This is really it though isn't it
I know new reddit has its potential inspiration in stopping LLM scraping(?) but websites are made worse because of some stupid metric that has to be fulfilled
Yes "the most real place" where they can just ban you whenever (the site, or its legions of - installed? - subreddit mods)
I got banned from the subreddit for my province (in Canada) a couple months ago - the stated reason was "ban evasion". It was my first ever ban.
Cool.
I wish they put more effort into Kagi news. Feels very barebones but has a lot of potential.
What do you feel is missing for a free news offering?
I don’t personally like it all that much, because it feels like it’s missing the depth I like in well-written reporting, but for those who just want a quick overview of topics once a day, it seems to work pretty well, no?
There are some defects like what does this mean?
> dir="auto" rather than inheriting the story's direction: quotes are reproduced verbatim, so a Hebrew story routinely carries an English one. Inheriting rtl left its closing punctuation stranded at the start of the line (KNEWS-453). -->
https://news.kagi.com/s/3gskhn
Kagi dev here, sorry about the bug; we had a malformed nested HTML comment that ended up partially rendering. This is now fixed.
Hey, I remember reading along before and around the time you were “officially” hired – happy Kagi could recognize your work, and seemingly continues to do so :)
Okay, strange, but that’s a bug, not a web app “feeling barebones” wrt. core functionality for most users, at least IMO.
Has that been reported on kagifeedback.org yet?
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.
> 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 just don’t want an account. I disagree with how they’re running things these days and I just don’t see the point when I only want to read posts, not make them, or comment or vote on them. And the more they push “Make an account! Get the app!” the less likely I am to do it. It’s a really hostile way to treat users. I don’t like most social media and it doesn’t bother me not having accounts on them, but it’s become such a pain with Reddit because it was one of the only places online left to get decent information about specific things. I’m now finding myself searching for things online and finding no answers because Reddit is inaccessible and that’s where the answer tends to be.
They are pretty ban-happy, and generally outright hostile to newly created accounts that try to participate.
I created an account recently after not having one for a couple years. I was banned within 2 weeks. I accidentally connected to my VPN when I had a Reddit page open in a minimized window that I forgot about. I assume that’s what did it. Last I checked, I couldn’t even login with this account anymore.
I don't like assisting reddit's monetization/AI training machine by tying my browsing activity directly to an account identity. I would prefer to browse anonymously and make them work at least a little bit harder to compile my anonymous activity into a coherent single-user profile.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
That sucks to have to create an account just to read user generated content if you don't contribute.
I'm annoyed mostly because I always surf with private browsing, so I always have to log in again and again. And for some reason I haven't bothered checking, Firefox doesn't save the username field.
I can still access old.reddit.com from my country/region
It is just people without accounts who are being blocked, and maybe it is regional?
If I could wave a magic wand, I would implement this like some kind of token replenishment or quota system like every IP address gets to access old dot like a very low number and if you log in with the same IP address you get more quota or replenished a little faster if you also come in with no auth like from a private window. Of course, in an ideal world we wouldn't have to do anything like this but yes, regional is likely as well.
I know I worked with some programmers in India and apparently some ISP will do some kind of trickery so like a lot of customers share the same ipv4 address. So what I said above might not actually make sense in the real world.
Is that trickery NAT, network address translation? It is a pretty widespread technique I think, we’d have run out of ipv4 addresses a while ago without it.
Yes, it is called carrier grade nat but the problem is you can't assume that an IP address maps to a user or even a household neatly. That's the problem.
> Reddit has recently blocked access to old reddit without an account
Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
Are you sure? If I visit https://old.reddit.com/r/haskell/ in private mode (i.e. without my auth cookies) then I am asked to log in.
I guess they are A/B testing this “feature”.
Probably a VPN or your IP was soft-banned. I have the same thing happen due to my network wide vpn
Yeah, that loads right up for me.
Wellp, not for me... Shame, reddit has/had really good answers to a variety of problems that I've had over the years. Not sure if there's a replacement for it, or if there will ever be another.
They are just trying to close the loophole from the scrapers.
They are selling content to google et al for their LLMs and they don't want to give it away for free.
You can still add .json to any thread and get the full comments in a single object. The anti scraping features must be a rate limiting thing, because it’s very machine readable otherwise. They just want to push people to be logged in and use the app.
Not for me - both at work and home. I need to be logged in.
Doesn't work for me
Maybe for you.
I get a nice
> Log in to use old Reddit
> To keep Reddit safe, accounts are required to access old Reddit. Log in, or continue without an account on reddit.com.
You in the UK?
I get the same, seemingly randomly, from US.
No more, since I installed the "always old reddit" plugin in firefox.
No, but I am not in the US
Not working for me either without an account anymore. Seems like a very recent change.
As of right now, on Firefox for Android, I am prompted to log in.
I had to login the other day to use it. Probably getting slowly rolled out.
> Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
It works sometimes, it's been inconsistent lately. I assume they're rolling out the blocks incrementally or something, because sometimes I can get through to it in a private window and other times I can't.
it works just fine for you, but not everyone.
Not for long, sadly.
This makes sense to me as a Kagi user. The chance that I'm going to subscribe to read an article I found via a search is zero.
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.
I'd be onboard with supporting a local newspaper -- if they hadn't gone all-in with aligning themselves to a particular political tribe. They're part of the problem Ground News makes obvious to a hilarious degree, where if something happens that doesn't fit the narrative you just will never see it if you only look at their platform. Given that not everyone has a reputable local newspaper I don't know that saying "everybody should" is necessarily sound advice.
Anyway, you can block sources individually in Kagi, that can weed out the most common paywall options you don't have, like Forbes or whatever.
Ground news is biased, excellent video about it here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CqE-SrgvTh4&pp=0gcJCXACo7VqN5t...
should is the key here. The lack of something to support is reason to not pay. Like you, I lack a good local newspaper. There is the nearby city, but they don't cover the important local news well.
Still I'm on the lookout for if someone ever does start covering local news. I don't need national news, even though that is what is cheap easy to get me. (because I get it from to many other places)
There's still valuable info in your local newspaper even if their agenda is the opposite of yours. You just have to read between the lines and phone their bias.
But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
You assume there is one. My 'local' covers high school sports, road construction, but none of the important issues that I need to care about to be an informed voter.
I need someone to be at the library board meeting, school board meeting, city counsel meeting... Some of these happen at the same time so I can't attend them all even if I didn't have other things not mentioned I'm doing then.
but a Bloomberg.com subscription is ONLY $39.99/month.......
$2 intro deal!*
*binding arbitration agreement required
Killer feature. It would be awesome to have some plugin or userscript to auto-swap the e-begging scammy link for an Archive link instead.
Is asking for money for your work begging? That's interesting take.
You're right, but I'd personally be okay with the paywalled article search results not showing up, since they are ads masquerading as usable search results.
If the publisher wants me to subscribe (and many do publish content worth paying for), they can reach me via normal means, versus corrupting my search results.
they are reaching out out via normal means. you don't get to redefine words because you are too cheap to pay for information and only read trash. its so funny how you idiots gibble about "if you do not pay you are the product" but everything you know about the world is you being the product
Normal means would be paying for ads, making cold calls, etc.
You do not see ads for a new pressure washer on Google News because that is not a normal place for ads to go.
You are free to redefine whatever you want for yourself.
Lol, this guy thinks you pay for information.
Do you think every bit of literature that is old, has no copyright, and in the public realm is trash? I tend to think the opposite actually. Nothing that’s been written in the past 100 years is worth the paper it’s on in my opinion. Maybe you’re the one who’s PAYING to read trash?
Right. I don’t mind paying when the value is clear and I feel like my time has been respected, and paywalled link showing up in search violates the second of those two.
In most of the circumstances when those show up in my search I’m looking for information for immediate use and I am not going whip out a credit card. If I run into a paywall, I’m immediately hitting the back button and moving on to the next result, so it’s better if they just never show up in search at all.
This sounds a bit odd to me. When I'm hungry, I dont run to McDonald's and expect to be fed for free. I whip out my card, pay for the items, patiently wait for the food to be arrive and then eat.
You could very well argue that why are you making me wait for my food when I'm hungry.
What gives?
The sibling reply has the right idea. Information and food are very different things, with the former spreading and duplicating every time a human comes in contact with it and often becoming readily available from a wide variety of sources.
To be clear, I have no issue paying for what I find to be quality writing, especially when it brings a novel, well thought out perspective or context. The a large majority of stuff I see turning up in search results is not this, however, especially in recent years. That category is dominated by AI-written growth hacky low info drivel.
i think the crux here is you can’t get the food for free next door like you can get with information
By this logic, listings for physical products shouldn't show in search results either, because they're just ads for something you have to pay for.
You aren't entitled to others' work for free, and sometimes the most relevant result for your search is something paid.
This is a particularly tone-deaf line of reasoning on Hacker News, IMO, because the tech industry is (a) so, so much better paid than journalism, for work that is easier, and (b) largely responsible for the death of journalism as a sustainable business.
Physical products are different because potential buyers are afforded a bevy of free, easily accessible ways to evaluate the product prior to purchase.
I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog that cuts off everything but the first sixth of its posts or a news site that stonewalls me after viewing an article or two.
I subscribe to multiple news sites and programming blogs and none of them resort to such tactics.
Most newspapers/magazines have extremely generous intro offers. NYT offers $4/month! WSJ offers $8/month! You can get a great literary magazine like n+1 with physical issues for $3! These are extremely good deals.
I mean, plenty of vibe-coded Show HN projects want more than that for something built in a weekend with close to zero ongoing costs.
It’s not just the monetary cost, but also the overhead involved. It’s yet another subscription to have to manage (and eventually jump through hoops to cancel) as well as the friction in the moment of needing to pull out a credit card or sign into PayPal or whatever.
As far as vibe coded projects go, I go out of my way to not pay for them not just because of the same reasons outlined above, but also because their value is questionable at best.
Prob easier to manage a month’s worth of subscriptions than write a single paragraph of one good article (spoken as someone with a subscription allergy personally!). Darn I feel bad for journalists, almost wish physical newspapers were just about our everything so we paid a few bucks for 1-2 things and felt the products in our hands. I think that status quo was OK for the industry (or maybe journalism has never been a decent business, but seemed OK).
I would be a lot less reticent to try subscriptions if cancellation were always a standard one-click affair. It’d also help if it were the norm for companies of any kind selling subscriptions to notify you before trials, promotional periods, etc are going to end instead of keeping silent and hoping you forget.
Remembering to cancel subscriptions that I wasn’t enthused with and figuring out the mystic ritual required to cancel are types of stress I don’t need any more of.
The "/month" is the problem - I just don't read the same paper often enough to justify a recurring subscription even at the intro price, let alone the full price it'll eventually transition to.
I would love it if I could be able to pay _once_ in one-click just like if I was purchasing a physical paper. But until this happens, I'm more than happy not paying (nor reading) paywalled online news.
> I have no way to throughly evaluate the quality of a blog
I don't like paywalls but this is very silly. You have exactly the same tools to evaluate products and blogs: reviews. You wanna figure out if you should pay for The Information? Go lookup a reddit thread on if it's worth it[1].
Also what "tactics"? Being indexed by a search engine? Nefarious!
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/venturecapital/comments/142ulk7/the...
I’m not likely to go on a side quest to look up reviews on a site I stumble upon in search of information. There’s a decent likelihood that the nugget I came for is either the only thing I need from the site or the site is something I’d use a small handful of times per year at most.
There’s “tactic” being used here is bait and switch.
The problem with paywalled news articles is that the ranking is done on the full article content, yet I am not allowed to see it. This often outranks the results I am allowed to see. Product pages don't have this problem.
Don't they? An ice cream maker might be highly ranked because of positive reviews from people who used it to make good ice cream, yet clicking through to the product page doesn't let me have ice cream unless I buy the machine!
Now imagine clicking through to the product page, and in order to view information about the product, you must pay first.
Product pages don't engage in cloaking or selectively serving a different a different page to the search engine crawler from the one served to the visitor. They are ranked based on the content visible on the page. If that's the best match to my search query, so be it (it probably means I am indeed searching for said product page).
Paywalled news articles rank on their full content (potentially displacing other, free sources) yet do not allow me to see it without paying. That's a bit of a problem because if I don't intend or am unable to pay I would much prefer seeing the other source which is free.
(the ice cream example is disingenuous because clearly we do not yet have the technology for ice-cream-over-HTTP. And when we do get such technology, then absolutely give me the option to block paywalled ice cream).
Is the idea that you strongly prefer seeing ads instead of paywalls?
I prefer ads because pihole blocks them. Paywalls block me, and then I have to reload and ninja enter reader mode, or if I’m reading inclined, find an archive link.
Wait, then how do you expect the journalists, sysadmins, server bills, etc. to get paid without paywalls and ads?
I think this short exchange highlights the problem really well.
Most people are uninterested in paying for those services, in part because the internet has trained them that information is free and in part because of fairly extreme polarization in opinions that seems to be everywhere.
Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good, but that information was something the news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago, reinforcing the idea that information should be free.
If there going to make money long term, they're going to have to find a new way to monetize. People are actively blocking the ads and don't want to pay for yet another subscription to content they don't access that often.
> going to have to find a new way to monetize
Or work on the old way. Convince Mark “Philanthropist” Zuckerberg to start an Antiadblock Foundation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270726> news companies were giving away for free not that many years ago
Haven't either ads or paywalls/subscriptions always been the primary way that news companies paid for journalists/sysadmins/servers, etc? What was the funding source 'not that many years ago' if not ads or paywalls/subscriptions?
> Arguing that people should pay for the information they consume now is well and good
Is arguing such a thing "well and good"? I'm not complaining, but my GP comment merely asking how the other user expected the sites he wants to get content from will pay their costs (as they said ads and paywalls/subscriptions were out) got downvoted - I'm not even sure that goes as far as arguing that people should help pay for content that they want to receive.
Assuming an actual journalist wrote the piece, and it's not some stitch together, half-slop, half-cognitive noise-ridden piece of crap, like, you know, about 80% of all content behind a paywall.
There is a regex replacement feature. You could build a list of known paywall domains to rewrite them to your desired paywall unblocker service.
Exactly: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html
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).
Hmmm, so if you are looking for some news item, you'll only find AI-written clickbait articles covered in pop-up ads, rather than any news sites that employ journalists?
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.
I guess the idea is that such people strongly prefer seeing ads instead of a paywall?
I agree it is a choice.
That's why it is a choice for companies to not pay for (human) software engineers anymore for writing software and to get all the agents to do the work and write the software that we use today.
Just like how we will see articles now being written by AI that will rank in Kagi instead of human written articles.
you can generally just bypass paywalls via archive sites.
Yeah, I don’t get it. Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
> Do people want actual journalism to go out of business?
Former Google Contributor user reporting in! I absolutely do not want normal journalism going out of business, but I’m not going to subscribe to Bloomberg or FT or any of those sites on a recurring basis for one article. I love the idea of paying a non-subscription for one thing, occasionally, though!
Yes, I also liked the crowdfunding model that the defunct YC startup Beacon Reader proposed. It’s too bad they didn’t make it.
Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month? Maybe you just want the exclusives which even then they often break stuff (at least Gurman on Bloomberg, especially if you care about Apple/OpenAI).
> Don’t Bloomberg & FT have a number of well-written, informative articles every month?
They do! And I did test a subscription to Bloomberg, and subscriptions to various other sites, but I have never found it compelling enough to visit for the price on a regular basis. I get my news from a large variety of sources. I have never found it valuable to only subscribe to one source, and I simply do not have the capital to justify subscribing to all of the places that sometimes publish good articles.
Yes, so does Economist, The Verge and many many other sites.
But I'm interested in maybe 3 articles a month. If I were to pay for them it's like paying for Netflix and watching a movie a month. Or subscribing to a dead-tree newspaper and only reading the comics.
I do get that micropayments are hard, but it's not a technical issue - it never has been. It's all about credit card costs and legalese.
I assume longer-term subs is what keeps the lights on at these firms.
Haha you couldn't pay me to read Bloomberg.
I'd be more than happy to pay for the day's paper when I want to read it, assuming it is just that, I pay for a particular day's paper and I get access to the whole paper without having to subscribe, register, or give up my personal information. If I could buy a paper online the same way I could in a 7-11, I absolutely would.
Goofy option since not many better for privacy:
Could ask a friend to subscribe for you and read the PDF from Telegram.
Only download this ROM if you own the original cartridge!
Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore? I feel it has gotten so bad that most younger people alive today do not even realize what journalism is supposed to be: only report the facts, never add your own opinion to the facts, if there is more than one side, ask each side and report what each side has to say without omitting or adding anything. These are just some super basic features of journalism that do not seem to exist anywhere anymore.
>Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore?
it seems rarer, for sure. perhaps the quantity of good journalism is the same but there's a lot more trash to sift through?
but i wouldnt say it went out of business or anything. there's some fantastic journalists out there still.
I think that sort of journalism has largely been purged from the traditional sources and has ended up on Substack, or their own site. It's transitioned from "I can trust Brand X" to "I can trust that individual because of their track record and the way they reliably report things that don't align with their own world view", etc. Glenn Greenwald is an example. The story around why he had to depart The Intercept (which he helped found!) is everything that's wrong with modern journalism that has pushed people like Glenn to places like Substack.
Bringing it back to paywalls and Kagi and paying for content, Glenn has 3 kids and I think a bunch of dogs and they all need to eat.
> Didn't journalism go out of business decades ago and now not even pretends to be journalism anymore?
So Daily Mail, Bloomberg, CNBC, BBC, CNN, ABC News, New York Times, FOX and many others all went out of business decades ago?
That is breaking news to me.
the parent's argument is that those companies don't really do journalism anymore, not the the companies themselves went out of business. they are more like entertainment networks.
and, for at least some of the ones you listed, i would have to agree that the bar for what they call "journalism" is not very high, and the concept of journalistic integrity appears to be a pretty low priority.
They have made a bed to lie in. Kagi is worth paying for; the vast majority of news sides are targeted at people who don't think critically, and serve a narrow-scope of corporate narratives.
I love high-quality journalism (Mainstream sources of the past; a few current gems like Quanta and PBS; you can find other exceptions). I have explicitly bumped the priority of the high-quality sources in search, and blocked or subdued some of the low quality ones which come up frequently.
Do you really think people are paying for these sites? I pay for my local newspaper, but I'm not going to be subscribing to dozens of newspapers, one is more than enough.
If newspapers want more traffic they need to get together and offer bundle deals, because expecting people to pay $20 a month subscriptions for multiple newspapers is a fantasy.
Is the Apple News model sufficient?
I think there should be more of it. Negatives for the Apple News model is that it's Apple only and there is no ad-free tier. It's also app locked so you can't use ad-blockers.
But yes, something like Apple News with an ad-free tier that works with standard websites. E.g. the participating news sites should recognize whatever service token you have and serve unpaywalled content.
Paywalling all content sucks, it just makes me leave the website. I pay for a news website from my country that gives me extra cool stuff like opinion articles and cultural highlights from my city, not because they paywall the basic news.
Somebody’s got to be paid to write the basic news articles. Maybe we could have a government funded “basic news” (although there are obvious concerns that that might turn into a propaganda service).
We could call it the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and it could directly fund local news stations. It could be a hybrid public/non-profit where the government funds some, members stations fund some, and donations fund the rest.
Member stations could be responsible for more local content and be a part of a network that syndicates content from other stations.
It could cover more than just news though - children's programming, think pieces, deeper dives into government.
Man, that would be great.
Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
> Edit: Sorry, didn’t mean this to be as sarcastic towards you OP, more annoyed we defunded it last year.
That’s ok I was already doing the whole “obliquely reference things that already exist in the abstract as if they were a novel idea” bit; you doubling down on it kind of makes it better.
They do get paid, they are employees and get a salary. I pay for the premium plan and that funds the company.
Too bad the new Kagi settings does not support allowing some paywalled domains to show up.
There's more than one model for news and some of those models don't even result in advertising-controlled biases. Public media sites employ journalists for instance.
Kagi specifically rocks because it lets you downrank those sites.
If you don’t intend to pay anyway, what’s the issue? This option just gives you the choice to hide paywall results.
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.
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.
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.)
This was my first thought. You're essentially removing the good stuff and leaving the slop.
I would pay for Brave or Kagi for like $2-3 per month if one of them supported private payments(actually that's exactly what Brave costs).
Paying should get you more privacy not less.
I'm not paying for Kagi because it's expensive and also doesn't support private payments and Brave has better UI for me.
Brave blocks their own ads while not supporting private payments and it doesn't let you use the search premium in Vanadium, it seems, which makes me question whether my subscription would work cross device. Maybe it would but only in Brave browser.
>Support private, independent search
>See search results ad-free
>Get a cleaner view on all results pages
>Cancel any time
Brave should also add more perks like maybe a smarter AI overview or if they ever stop giving unlimited AI then you get some. At this point it seems like a donation.
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
Yeah they should use privacy pass for the default accounts as well to decouple payment from account.
Absolutely not. I don't feel it's necessary to pay the sacrifices needed for a trustless society.
I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
>I would much rather be able to have things like personalised searches (which are identifying).
This wouldn't affect your accounts usability or features it would just delink your payment from your account. Same as paying for Mullvad with a giftcard bought on Amazon.
I don't really understand your first paragraph.
Privacy Pass would decouple each search from the account. I think it’s okay to have as an opt-in thing. But private payments should be the default IMO.
I see. I mispoke with "privacy pass" although it's similar. I meant like a one time break between your payment and account for regular accounts underneath the option to use privacy pass.
Like posteo does it or Brave does it for Origin:
https://posteo.de/en/site/payment
I think we’re broadly in agreement: the more private options we have (with different levels of privacy), the better.
It’s possible, in theory, to use Privacy Pass to allow e.g. using credit card to pay for the whole subscription without associating the account with the payment. (E.g. one payment gives you 1 “pass”, and it can be used to extend your account validity for one month.) In practice, it’ll probably be fairly easy to correlate a payment with an account extension, as those would happen almost simultaneously, so a couple more levels are needed here (e.g. doing this through resellers, and maybe breaking up the subscription payment into, say, 30 “day passes” which are used in random order to make it harder to track).
Posteo’s “one-time code system” is a fair bit weaker than Privacy Pass btw: when they get a payment, they can still associate it with your account (so if you’ve paid using, say, bank transfer, they will know your name, and you’ll have to trust them not to store the link). But it can be used together with Privacy Pass :-)
While they don't offer anonymous/private payments, you can use PrivacyPass no matter how you pay for Kagi. So, yes, the fact that you have an account will be known to anyone with access to their subscriber data, but what you search for will not be tied to that identity.
And in addition, they just ask the minimal info to be able to use the service, an email address, and not a full usual registration.
Not sure what you mean by "private payments" but Kagi accepts Bitcoin: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
Monero ideally combined with something like this but one or the other would also be an improvement:
>Brave uses a blind token protocol based on Privacy Pass, which decouples payment identity from service usage. These privacy-preserving subscription credentials allow the browser to verify you have a valid purchase of a premium product (like Origin) without learning anything about you.
https://brave.com/origin/
I wish there was some kind of EFF-curated "privacy/internet freedom" pass that I could buy.
Kagi is great, but it's not everything. Brave is great, but it's not everything. Signal, GrapheneOS, Tor... this is a battle with many fronts and it's kind of labor intensive to manage a whole bunch of subscriptions/recurring donations.
I'd love to just buy the pass and rest assured that if one of the recipients of that money starts behaving badly, the curator is going to reroute money from them, to whatever the better-behaved alternative is.
The curator (doesn't have to be the EFF, they're just the first to come to mind) can host a https://datatracker.ietf.org/wg/privacypass/about/ token faucet which I use to prove to the various services that I'm among their paid users, but without exposing to any evesdropper any details about myself or that payment. Sometimes such tokens would be unnecessary... it's just a donation... but other times it would be the price of admission. You'd put the coin in the slot to make the thing go. (I'm not talking about cryptocurrency here, it's just a key that deactivates after being used once, and a way to get plenty of them from the curator who is also authoritative about whether you've paid or not).
There was this https://blog.torproject.org/funding-internet-freedom-togethe...
That's a good idea and it could give you a checklist to select the projects you want to support.
Signal, Tor, and GrapheneOS(through github) have monthly recurring option so you can just set that up once.
Do you imply that you never order anything online?
My search engine is a digital product that's already free and private and good and is different to when you give someone your home address to send a package.
Do you use Google instead?
Brave.
Fair enough! How has it been for you?
It's actually a very similar UI to Google at least, in a good way if Google was ever good.
The results are quite good except images I like the results more then DDG or Startpage.
Google’s still king vs. DDG (Bing-ish), Startpage, & Kagi. By a longshot. How’s Brave Images?
Terrible image results. I prefer Brave's website results to Google though.
I love Kagi but will probably be selective or ignore this one. Sometimes, I like to know what's out there, and I don't have a problem with paying for good content.
I used to be a Kagi subscriber and I would so like to be one again — but their stubbornness in using Russian data in their indexing, and paying Russian businesses for the data is what is stopping me.
I wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
I similarly stopped subscribing when I realised they were paying money to Musk for grok, and I refuse to fund that man in any way. I hadn't seen the Russian data usage. The Kagi founder above states that using these services doesn't imply support of the governments or owners behind them, but that's a crock of shit. Using their services is, at best, an indicator of a complete lack of principles to a degree that I can now never use their service. He asks for respect for his moral line above, but no-one owes him that - not every viewpoint deserves respect.
Being principled in your choice of services as an individual these days is challenging, as so many companies pursue money over all else. It is doable, however, and Kagi won't feature in my life again no matter how many cool features they add. The internet has become such a cesspit that it warms my heart to know there are still other people who believe in being good and principled, not just making money.
(Kagi founder here)
I respect that you're making a principled choice, even though we see this differently. Kagi uses products and services from companies around the world, including the USA, Europe, and China, but that does not imply endorsement of the actions (past, present, or future) of any of the governments where those companies are based. We'd rather focus on building great software than on things in the world we can't control. Our decisions are guided by the relentless pursuit of the best product quality, user privacy, and our goal of providing a user-centric alternative to dominant tech platforms.
edit: I encourage you (and others in similar dilemma) to watch our origin story to see why are we here and what it is that we stand for https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qSntB1ip4RE
Unfortunately, paying money to an economy of a country which started and still wages an unprovoked war against another country, killing civilians indiscriminately, is a choice. The only reason you can "focus on building great software" is because you are not in Ukraine, where Russian bombs paid for by the aforementioned Russian economy would be falling on your head.
Not to mention the problematic nature of trusting any data coming from a country known for state-sponsored deception, trolling and organized operations in informational warfare.
(to the inevitable whatabouters: yes, this can also be applied to other economies/countries, everyone makes their own moral choices on where to draw the line, but the line should be drawn somewhere)
I am saddened by your stubborn stance on this.
I actually do know what it’s like to have bombs falling on my head. I lived in Serbia during the US-led bombing in 1999. I continued using US company products during and afterward, and eventually moved to the United States, while many of my fellow countrymen drew a line similar to yours. I never felt that companies or individuals elsewhere owed me a boycott on my behalf. That experience shaped my reluctance to treat commercial relationships as endorsements of governments or their actions.
I acknowledge everyone draws their own moral line. I respect where you’ve drawn yours, and I ask for the same consideration in return. I don’t think either of us is going to change the other’s mind, so I’ll leave it here. I genuinely appreciate that you care enough about Kagi to have this conversation.
What is it with Serbians and always supporting war crimes and genocide? Serbia deserved to be bombed (and more), your argument does not work.
Writing as an internet rando (to another?): please don't make such comments.
Phrasing it as "X deserved to be bombed" is needlessly inflammatory. I agree that something had to be done and that given the choice between inaction like in Bosnia and the NATO intervention like we for Kosovo, I'd easily pick the latter. It's even plausible that the NATO intervention was close to the best that could be done and any harm was a "necessary evil". However, saying that the civilian population of the undemocratic Yugoslav state deserved to have their lives disrupted by being bombed (or worse??) is just cruel.
I don't think your comment will convince the previous poster or (most importantly) unrelated third parties.
(For the record: the implicit comparison between the Russian invasion of the Ukraine and the NATO intervention in Serbia, by the previous poster _is_ IMO deeply dismaying.)
> I don’t think either of us is going to change the other’s mind, so I’ll leave it here.
So so so disappointing.
Keep the argument going if you can!
He didn’t boycott USA when we bombed him. What’s gonna convince him? Maybe someone has the words.
If the option existed to remove various sources for search results (for me, Yandex, and hopefully any payment to them) existed, I’d be back.
I was more tolerant of my money going to US companies when I first tried Kagi, but my views have shifted a lot in the last year or so.
US actions have shifted in recent times, and it’s just foolish belligerence now. There was a bit of nuance in the past but at present it doesn’t even serve US interests.
Good idea. Not prioritized it seems: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-...
Serbia deserved it for the genocide they were perpetrating.
This is deeply disappointing.
> Not to mention the problematic nature of trusting any data coming from a country known for state-sponsored deception, trolling and organized operations in informational warfare.
What, like the United States of America?
I find it so odd that people think Kagi's commercial agreement with Yandex is more offensive than theirs with Google or Microsoft, both of whom have contracts with the US military. Surely they're equally as abhorrent, particularly the use of their AI models for combat warfare purposes.
> (to the inevitable whatabouters: yes, this can also be applied to other economies/countries, everyone makes their own moral choices on where to draw the line, but the line should be drawn somewhere)
Genuinely curious: on the correct side of your personal line, what services do you now use that replace Kagi? Presumably they'd be EU-based, like Qwant or Ecosia?
which search engines have no ties to the three countries currently waging illegal wars of aggression? :)
Ecosia and Qwant are the two EU-based ones I know of currently, though I'm sure there are more.
ignoring any Russian data isn't that hard
Actually it's kinda hard in a world where very few companies dominate the search index market and there's very few players who license out their data, one of them being a Russian one: https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...
i'd love to see your attempt at a search engine without russian data
I want the opposite. I want links to the best quality information - even if I have to hunt down a copy.
I wish there were a way to use my Kagi subscription with ChatGPT/Claude. I can't switch completely to Kagi Assistant right now as it doesn't have feature parity and the subscriptions with OpenAI/Claude are good value. Paying for API credits in addition to my Kagi subscription seems steep.
This is the kind of feature that would potentially make me switch, but I feel like at this point AI has disrupted web search for me in such a fundamental way that I rarely use a search engine nowadays.
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.
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.
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.
Kagi also offers Kagi Assistant, which seems to harness models to apply a search-first behavior, and tends to produce higher-quality results for information that would not normally be within a given model's training data. While the cheaper Kagi plans don't offer the full slate of frontier models, I've found that Kimi models in Kagi Assistant are generally excellent for discovering information, even if I may then go to Claude or Gemini frontier models to parse what I've found.
Kagi Assistant also seems to be a bit lighter on guardrails. I was trying to understand how Libby ebooks are stored and encrypted a few weeks back, and no matter what I did, I could not get any Anthropic products to help me - they insisted I was an evil pirate. Kagi Assistant with either Kimi or Grok (sigh) were happy to help. (If I was doing something nefarious, not sure how far they would have gone, though.)
I use the Bangs feature to open paywalled links with archive.is with !a. When I write !a before the link in the address bar, it redirects to the archive for that particular page. Most of the time it is already in archive.is.
Bang settings:
URL Template: https://archive.is/newest/%s
Bang shortcut: whatever letter you want.
I'm sure a basic browser extension can be developed for that specific action too, but it does not bother me to write !a every now and then.
Why don't we have a pre-paid wallet that I can pay for each article across websites? it will be the alternative model to ads.
While this is a nice feature, needing an account (nevermind paying) to then only get a meta search engine will prevent me from ever using it.
I already spread my searches across at least four different engines (Bing, Ecosia, Startpage & Yandex), so no single provider has a complete profile of all my searches.
I certainly won't be paying to hand over my data.
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.
They do offer a mostly anonymous search via the privacy pass. It generates tokens to prove subscription without providing account details. I believe it changes token every session, but it might be every search.
Mostly anonymous because even if they don’t know your account, we all know they can still track your fingerprint.
Keep in mind I have drank the Kagi koolaid, so I’m a bit biased.
I really like the direction Kagi is taking here. It feels like theyre' building the product around how people actually use it rather than chasing every new AI trend
Would be nice if there was some transparency about which sites this will filter.
I wish Safari included Kagi as a built-in search bar option!
It's really ludicrous that Safari doesn't let you configure the search bar. My number one complaint about it bar none.
So goofy.
Shoutout StopTheMadness for allowing me to redirect one of the defaults as I see fit (URL redirects), even add a !k bang to DuckDuckGo via regex.
The actual 2026 iOS Safari search options… this is what Apple’s trillions want to offer (well maybe want to offer only the first one) and absolutely nothing more:
I love it. I don't mind paying; I just prefer to tip rather than pay a subscription! I miss Google Contributor [0]!
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
Happy Kagi ultimate user here too from jp. Only I d like to know more about their indexing. This was the primary reason I sw. to Kagi but it seems Kagi is not doing much indexing by itself.
I wish Kagi had existed years ago. I just saw someone talking about the Google SEO-laden experience when troubleshooting coding errors and realized it’s a pain I haven’t felt in a long time. It’s telling that Google never made a “remove this site from results” option. Their incentives weren’t set up to provide the best user experience.
Even worse, their programmable search used to allow this, but the feature was removed this year.
This is what we really need and others should focus on this, niche settings for AI implementations. We are already tired of seeing the same stuff come up again and again when using AI. This is the type of stuff that can make AI more enjoyable and useful
I love Kagi so much. What an incredibly thoughtful, fast, powerful, customizable search tool. I love that I can filter-out / rank / save search tools, and their focus on speed & execution makes it deeply worth a few bucks a month.
Ideally it would have a way to allow list domains for sources where I do have a subscription.
I've been building my own metasearch engine after using Kagi for a long while and I must say that my results are getting better even than theirs.
Kagi can do things at their scale that are not feasible for me right now and one of them is categorising links like they probably do for this feature. So it is inspiring. A route that might work is checking if there are ublock lists that keep track of paywalled sites.
I've also been looking into creating my own search index, but this is a huge undertaking. I might go the tiny index route like Marginalia has done and try to find a niche for my specific use cases.
Another route could be to categorise websites better automatically and build up a category index.
Any chance I could try it.
If it was 50-75% as good as Kagi, I’d pay a subscription.
I’d also really like a way to use it in safari/mobile safari.
There is not firefox plugin for this?
Very useful feature to have. I've not dived into using Kagi just yet, but they may just win me over with this.
The thing that bothers me about most paywalls is that they want you to take a subscription to remove it. I've got more than enough subscriptions in my life.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
Why does no one use the Google Pay or Apple Pay integration for single articles? Have me pay a buck for an article, and I'd happily do so.
If you pay $15/month to Apple News, you get tens of thousands of articles a month for less than a penny each.
Or you can see what app your local public library is hooked up with. Mine gives free access to several hundred newspapers and magazines from around the world.
The app isn't great, but the price is right.
Still, most people who moan on HN don't want to bother with the minor inconvenience of getting a library card. It's much easier to complain in public and click an archive link.
If they actually put their money where their mouths are, they wouldn't be able to satisfy their fake righteous indignity and draw attention to themselves.
I would like to be able to whitelist some paywall sites, e.g. I have an FT subscription and would like to have that bypass the block.
I have hundreds of pdfs of books, and a thousand dollar library (my friends call it) We have to keep this stuff. This isn't the first time we've lost our books. It happens every 80 or so years
AI slopped extension for supposedly just badging paywalls, not excluding them, https://github.com/masseyzachery57/paywall-filter-extension
I can still read most paywalled articles by either blocking JS or digging into the HTML source code. I wish the browser could handle this issue by wgetting the source and decoding it without giving away any information about the visitor
The browser already handles this: Activate reader mode.
Go ahead, keep taking my money, Kagi.
This is actually an excellent idea. Well done.
Would the biggest impact of this be for things like news sources? I guess the idea is that ads are preferrable, as ads and paywalls seem to be two of the primary existing ways that such places support themselves (or don't)?
Except for maybe some very local stories, almost all news is available on free sites, or will be shortly once the story breaks.
Are we talking a company rewording reporting that a different news company hired 1 or more journalists, etc. to originally report? And in this example, are the sites "free" because ads are enabled?
omg, great really!!!
When will this be available into HN, too ?
>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.).
I don't see it offhand in the newsguidelines page nor the submit page? https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/submit
Edit: It's in the newsfaq page https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html per the replies
Yes here in FAQs:
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so. But please don't post complaints about paywalls. Those are off topic. More here
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
it's in https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html
Are paywalls ok?
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds.
in other words, its not ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that do not have workarounds.
uh, I did not know: what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround... (many thanks to them)
>what I saw, so far, is that paywalled submission appears and then some volunteer would reply with a workaround.
right. there is no requirement that the submitter provides the workaround themselves.
the requirement is that a workaround exists. sometimes nice commenters will provide the workaround, but again, the only requirement is that it is possible to workaround the paywall.
ah, great.
Super clear now, thank you.
I’d pay for a search engine these days if it meant good results and no AI. Kagi almost fits the bill.
Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!
Interesting! This is something a couple of customers have requested for Uruky (co-founder here), among the highlight/removal of "AI Slop" and "Malicious URLs", but I honestly never thought it would be widely wanted. I guess we're wrong and we might add that soon. Does anyone know of a good (and free as in freedom) source/list for such URLs? They didn't seem to mention any.
I love Kagi. I want to see them do well, of all of the search alternatives, this is the only one where I’ve never felt the need to go back to google.
I was setting a up a new computer the other day and got confused that the first three links for a search were ads, then I remembered it was google and they hide the things you’re looking for.
Site priority, lenses and the slop filter are all icing on the cake.
Just enabled it- Love Kagi!
With Google having ruined its search engine, we need alternatives. The more the better. It would be kind of entertaining if Google Search would die (but with viable non-AI alternatives to it that are useful), because then Google's addiction to adMoney would also mean its core identity is now totally different. The Google today has nothing to do with the original Google; it is now basically just a money grab company trying to force ads onto everyone. A soulless and pointless moloch.
I find it ironic that a paywalled search engine is filtering out other paywalled websites
Here come all the Kagi sponsored comments lol
Ah, shouldnt they rather introduce an option to bypass paywalls automaticly to Archive.PH? :-D
Paywalls differ by the difficulty of circumventing them - for NYT/WaPo paywalls it's enough to delete cookies for domain, for WSJ/FT you have to use archive.is, and surely there are paywalls with no known workarounds too.
Great decision
I hate that our solution to the modern Internet is to engage in technical warfare just to make it usable. Will someone invent a new pay-to-play Internet that does not engage in warfare against its own users?
Everyone hate paywalls, ads, and aggregators. So what business models are even left? Are we just going to have patron supported echo chambers and propaganda from now on?
I am of the opinion that ads are not inherently bad, just that they have gone too far.
An ad on the sidebar is not an issue. For example the site for Rufus: rufus.ie
The issue is when ads cause trouble loading, autoplay audio, block the content of the website, have fake close buttons… Really anything that prevents a user from using the site for it’s intended purpose.
Things only go stale when the people behind them get greedy. As another user said, micropayments won’t work because the credit card companies take half the money. If some major players were willing to earn a decent profit rather than the optimal profit, stuff would work a lot better on the user end.
> So what business models are even left?
Maybe they can take a hint from Spotify?
Kudos to Kagi!
the paywall-removal setting is really just Kagi admitting that for most queries the best answer is a link it has to quietly break into for you
The update is useful, especially the paywall filter. I might even consider switching platforms; it seems convenient...
I believe Kagi has been annotating paywalled results with a circled dollar sign for some time.
This new feature completely weeds such results out of every search.
It would be nice to be able to toggle this (1) in the options drop-down menu on the results page (like Verbatim and Personalized modes), as well as (2) inline (with a "!nopaywall" bang or something).
I use Brave Search+ DuckDuckGo+ Google Image search and that seems to sastify my search requirements while keeping my payment info private.
I don't think I will ever think of subscribing to Kagi metasearch engine, especially since their paywalled search offerings seem to be inferior to other options.
That should have been an option in Google since the first paywall was put up.
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).
This started with expertsexchange:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3182198
but unlike that stack overflow predecessor that attempted to build itself as a paywalled business, newspapers successfully strongarmed Google, at least in the EU, by arguing against Google monopolistic powers so it's unlikely that Google would dare put them in the shitlist.
How about a setting that removes Cloudflare captcha blocked links from search results? Or let me define a profile of good/bad website practices (recipe blogspam, paywall, captchas, etc) and autodown/up rank for me.
This needs to have a whitelist feature, as I am a paying subscriber to a few well known paywalled news sites that I will use Kagi search to find years old articles. But I would like sites I don't subscribe to to be excluded.
Paywalls fucking suck. No I'm not going to subscribe to your publication just so I can read one fucking article. I would however pay 5-10 dollars a month to get access to a variety of news sites (ad free of course - albeit less of a problem using a real browser with UBO). No such service existed the last time I checked, but it doesn't feel like much of a leap for a paid service like Kagi to facilitate.
nice
Have they added an option to not fund russian invasion into Ukraine?
Have they stopped sponsoring terrorism?
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.
https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2025/07/17/kagi/
I think it is because they are tied to Yandex (or used to be) which is Russian. I don't know how much it directly supports State funded terrorism but it is likely none.
You'd guess wrong, because modern Yandex is essentially Kremlin owned, so it is directly supporting it, not in a huge amount (on account of Kagi being relatively tiny company), but definitely not 'none'.
Also in the discussions about removal or at least asking to make it toggle-able, so users can make sure their requests and money are not forwarded to Russia have been shut off and ridiculed (including staff member saying "our views on the war differ" whatever that meant.
Kagi, search engine that costs you to use has something against publishers who require a fee for their content. Interesting
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.