alt Hacker NewsI tried Kagi for a couple of months and then cancelled.
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
I've switched to DDG and have been happier, YMMV.
Replies
hey quick question, what part of Hermes were you using for search? Do they have a similar web portal to Kagi's Assistant or is it more like the AI overview below the search bar?
I'm not at all a supporter of Putin and his wars. A question for you though: does DDG show ads for any evil companies? Where does DDG get it's search results?
I think you’re objections are fair and real so I won’t dismiss them
The ai credit thing is real too and I’ve written to them about it several time. My solution was just to sign up for the entire year in one go
You have to keep in mind it’s only like $25 of usage, though they could handle the experience better. In the past in the assistant it would even delete your prompt when you ran out and it was super annoying
As a product though I think it’s great - more than good enough to get off of google, I like the privacy aspect, and it’s ai features slot in nicely between search and my Claude subscription
If you follow the money, somewhere you’ll find something unsavory. This is me mostly coping, admittedly, but Kagi is good enough that a) I want to cope and b) hope continues to thrive as a full featured search engine that is a legitimate alternative to Google
DDG is good too, not quite on par with Kagi though. Kagi is super configurable and customizable- e.g. lenses, down ranking websites (e.g. for me Pinterest appears way low in search results) ai slop detection, etc
It’s also cool to be a paying customer - you email them, they respond, and sometimes even fix a bug right away for you
Happy overall with the service even though I agree it’s not perfect
Kagi is HN’s favorite darling, but their leadership constantly makes anti-user, bad business decisions.
Remember their “early adopter” drama? Wasn’t their only drama.
> but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war
Wait til you realize the search engines you use now are funding directly AND indirectly even more pointless wars than that one...
> but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war
How is funding america any better?
Yandex.com is a company based in Europe while .ru is Russian based
Counterpoint: I use Kagi Assistant on the $10/mo plan for literally everything I would have used Google for before and have never burned my monthly credits.