alt Hacker NewsKagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results
Comments
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 wish Safari included Kagi as a built-in search bar option!
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.
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.
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.
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.
Have they added an option to not fund russian invasion into Ukraine?
Ah, shouldnt they rather introduce an option to bypass paywalls automaticly to Archive.PH? :-D
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.
Great decision
I want the opposite. I want links to the best quality information - even if I have to hunt down a copy.
Ideally it would have a way to allow list domains for sources where I do have a subscription.
Just enabled it- Love Kagi!
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?
Very useful feature to have. I've not dived into using Kagi just yet, but they may just win me over with this.
This is actually an excellent idea. Well done.
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!
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.
omg, great really!!!
When will this be available into HN, too ?
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)?
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.
Kagi, search engine that costs you to use has something against publishers who require a fee for their content. Interesting
AI slopped extension for supposedly just badging paywalls, not excluding them, https://github.com/masseyzachery57/paywall-filter-extension
Kudos to Kagi!
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.
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).
That should have been an option in Google since the first paywall was put up.
nice
[flagged]
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.
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!”.