Kagi

What hackers pick instead

• DuckDuckGoA free, privacy-focused search engine that many find good enough now that Google has declined, with options to turn off AI; critics find results weaker than Google's.286recommend
• SearXNGSelf-hosted metasearch engine that blends results from many engines without ads, tracking or AI summaries. Common caveat: upstream engines often rate limit or block it.76recommend
• Brave SearchPeople recommend it as a private search engine with its own independent index, optional AI answers, and no forced AI. Critics say its results are sometimes weaker than Google's.67recommend
• StartpagePrivate search that gives anonymous access to Google results and is a popular fallback. Critics say results trail Google and it is owned by an advertising company.25recommend
• QwantRecommended as a European alternative to Google that sometimes gives better results, though critics say it omits results Google finds and copies Google's interface.22recommend

Every quote

The 40 most detailed of 1432 comments. Each links to the original.

1. if you care more about not having your data/attention be the revenue source and having software incentives be to offer something customers are willing to part money for, Kagi is still it.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Kagi Changelog (July 2): Heads, tails, and an AI toggle”

2. I (and a non trivial number of people I knok) have switched to Kagi for search just to avoid having to deal with the bullshit that is the above the fold google search results.

   Recommends · Oct 2026 · in “Google Search is now less than half of Alphabet’s revenue”

3. I am quite happy with my Kagi search results. The biggest weakness I have noticed in my few months using it is that it is a terrible experience for shopping.

   Mixed · Mar 2026 · in “Kagi Small Web”

4. I really like Kagi because of all the features and just generally letting me be a user instead of a product, but they have some weird kludges sometimes.

   Mixed · Jan 2026 · in “Kagi releases alpha version of Orion for Linux”

5. I really like how Kagi does it - summary only appears if you finish your query with a question mark, or if you press "q" after loading the results

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “The Mozilla Cycle, Part III: Mozilla Dies in Ignominy”

6. Yet they somehow manage to filter them out with a fraction of the resources available to Google itself with no negative impact on search quality.

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Disrupting the Largest Residential Proxy Network”

7. Im happy with it. I have filters which will try to find search results from before 2022, which has greatly improved the quality of results for me

   Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Kagi Bloopers – Search Results Gone Wrong”

8. I've been a Kagi user for years now; I've kept an eye out for alternatives time and again, but I just haven't found anything even close to Kagi.

   Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Back to Kagi”

9. With Kagi you can opt in to an LLM summary of the search result by appending a question mark to the query. It's a neat mechanism when it works!

   Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi”

10. I started with Kagi in 2024, and sometimes across different/new browser setups I accidentally land on Google and want to immediately throw up.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Back to Kagi”

11. The whole value proposition of kagi is that it moves you from being the product(eyeballs for ads) to the customer of a product(search results)

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Using Kagi Search with Low Vision”

12. kagi has been pretty good. Not great but way better for searches for information that happen to have a lot of people selling you something.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Gmail registration now requires scanning a QR code and sending a text message”

13. It does one job and does it well, and you have additional features if you want/need to configure them or tweak the results to your liking.

    Recommends · Jun 2026 · in “Kagi Magic”

14. It's not perfect, but I want to at least show a demand. I'm willing to contribute premiums for proper services that won't mine all my data

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “The fate of "small" open source”

15. I love the way Kagi does AI - it defaults to a regular search, but if you add a question mark to the end, it will give you an AI answer.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode”

16. It's such a breath of fresh air, like a search engine from an alternate universe where Google just focused on search instead of adtech.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Google Removed 749M Anna's Archive URLs from Its Search Results”

17. Kagi does this really nicely, you just add a question mark at the end and it'll add on top of the search results an LLM summary

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode”

18. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either.

    Recommends · Feb 2026 · in “Leaving Google has actively improved my life”

19. the results are great, the assistant is great, and I like customizing the search result UI as well to look as clean as possible

    Recommends · Mar 2026 · in “Acme Weather”

20. The domain-block feature makes it worth it for me. Finally no longer having medium or userbenchmark pollute my search results.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Kagi Bloopers – Search Results Gone Wrong”

21. I dont find myself googling (searching) much anymore, so paying to do so just becomes something i need to find a way around.

    Mixed · Jul 2026 · in “Kill The Cookie Banner”

22. the $5 tier is not a honest to good option. The $10 one is but they can make the $5 one genuine too by increasing the quota

    Mixed · Sep 2026 · in “google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update”

23. The results for every search was jammed with AI and "listicles" and all this shit that made the results essentially impossible to parse for me

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “Kagi Small Web”

24. every time I search for something, I have to use 100% of my brain just to work out which results are slops and which are not, even on Kagi

    Criticizes · Mar 2026 · in “AI is unhealthy in a variety of different ways”

25. And search won't get cheaper because I imagine they've made the mistake of treating the unused AI credit as a subsidy for other services

    Criticizes · Sep 2026 · in “Kagi Translate Is Back”

26. seeing AI bundled with searches in the pricing for Kagi really just sucks the value out of the main reason I want to switch to Kagi

    Criticizes · Nov 2025 · in “Kagi Assistants”

27. they use Yandex(be it only for images according to their own words) and I'm sure as hell refusing to give a single cent to them

    Criticizes · Jun 2026 · in “Show HN: Uruky (EU-based Kagi alternative) now has Image Search and URL Rewrites”

28. their stubbornness in using Russian data in their indexing, and paying Russian businesses for the data is what is stopping me

    Criticizes · Aug 2026 · in “Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results”

29. Kagi has the world's most pleasant engagement retention email life-hack, which is that if you don't use it for a whole month, they'll email you telling you that they refunded that month's price.

    Recommends · Jan 2026 · in “Backseat Software”

30. I switched to it because I have YouTube tv - essentially Google as cable tv provider - and noticed how commercials became too correlated with recent Google searches for comfort.

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Kagi Bloopers – Search Results Gone Wrong”

31. Kagi, you're generally great. I'm usually happy to be a paying customer. But I refuse to believe that deduping a list of URL's is actually too hard for you.

    Mixed · Nov 2025 · in “Kagi Bloopers – Search Results Gone Wrong”

32. I was delighted they implemented this simple yet powerful idea. I don't even remember when I have needed to go to a second page of search results in Kagi

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update”

33. I want Kagi to have enough customers to run a business and earn a profit but not so many that they need to make the product worse to continue growing.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore”

34. That plan comes with Kagi Assistant, which is more than enough with big selection of simple models for a great portion of AI assisted queries.

    Recommends · Jul 2026 · in “Back to Kagi”

35. Like if you search for "grain filling oak" using an engine like Kagi(because Google just sells you the same product repackaged over and over)

    Mixed · May 2026 · in “DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode”

36. They are building their own search index, and they should be allowed to scrape Google in the exact same way Google scraped everybody else.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Search engines alternatives now that Google isn't Google anymore”

37. Kagi can be "better" than Google (for some very narrow definitions of better) because they basically don't have to think about SEO at all.

    Recommends · Sep 2026 · in “google.com/goto: Google's anti-scraping update”

38. While I still often just search with Kagi, I have found it often easier to write a fullblown natural language question into Kagi Assistant

    Recommends · Nov 2025 · in “Mullvad: Shutting down our search proxy Leta”

39. Huge fan of Kagi so far - especially SmallWeb if you do want to find websites that probably would not hit the top of Google search results

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “Google Cloud Fraud Defence is just WEI repackaged”

40. The kagi link (1) a sibling comment left was an example of an AI that can improve writing while also informing about better writing style.

    Recommends · May 2026 · in “No Slop Grenade”