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.
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'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.
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/
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.
> 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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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 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
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/
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...