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.
"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 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'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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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? ;)
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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). -->
> 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.
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.
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'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.
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.
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).
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!
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).
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
What's trash about it? Giving no explanation does not contribute to a conversation.
I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
Because it lets me hide the trash that is commercialized internet. I choose what service I pay for, e.g. Kagi, everything else should just vanish from my point of view and stop polluting my eye space.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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
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 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 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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”.
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 think it's a great complement to human lead search.
EDIT: I see I have $5 of "pre-paid API credit". Is this a one-time thing or is that included with my plan?
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.
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.
If only Kagi had a Shopping feature, then it would be a complete solution for us.
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.
Why?
presumably they want a shopping feature so that they can shop, and otherwise find Kagi has all of the features they want
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?
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).
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)_/¯
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.
But, regular models and harnesses work okay for this too. You just have to specify “web search”, very important.
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?
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.
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'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.
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.
https://github.com/isene/ClaudeCode/blob/main/agents/web-res...
I think there is a lot of space for improvement on "searching skills" though, sometimes the search strings they use are not great.
which model?
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
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.
I do remember them asking about shipping information at some point though.
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 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!
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 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?
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.
They work very well for LLM tokens though. So, go ahead and get your news that way.
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.
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.
https://nakamotoinstitute.org/library/micropayments-and-ment...
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.
Edit: Typo
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.
Okay, new topic then. Have you heard of InstaPot? ;)
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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)
Friends send me links to reddit and stuff so it's handy to have an automatic redirect.
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.)
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 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). -->
https://news.kagi.com/s/3gskhn
Has that been reported on kagifeedback.org yet?
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.
If that doesn't bother you, then good for you, and we have different feelings about privacy.
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 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.
Old Reddit still works just fine without an account.
They are selling content to google et al for their LLMs and they don't want to give it away for free.
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.
No more, since I installed the "always old reddit" plugin in firefox.
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.
However tracking that is tricky at best.
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.
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)
But the biggest stories in your local community will of course be completely hushed many times.
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.
*binding arbitration agreement required
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.
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?
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.
You could very well argue that why are you making me wait for my food when I'm hungry.
What gives?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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).
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.
Or work on the old way. Convince Mark “Philanthropist” Zuckerberg to start an Antiadblock Foundation:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49270726Haven'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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean
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.
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!
Could ask a friend to subscribe for you and read the PDF from Telegram.
Only download this ROM if you own the original cartridge!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/plans/payment-methods.html
[2] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/tor.html
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.
Like posteo does it or Brave does it for Origin:
https://posteo.de/en/site/payment
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).
>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/
The results are quite good except images I like the results more then DDG or Startpage.
I also don't care if people have original ideas if they take an existing idea and do it better, which is what I appreciate about Kagi at the moment. I don't want anything interesting or novel. I want search that doesn't berate me with ads or AI overviews if I don't ask for them.
That's why this is a good feature.
Search engines shouldn't be replaced by AI but they unfortunately are and it result sucks to see.
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.
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.)
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 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.
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.
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 wish they stopped doing this. I really, really want to like them and be a subscriber again.
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
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 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.
So so so disappointing.
He didn’t boycott USA when we bombed him. What’s gonna convince him? Maybe someone has the words.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Removing paywalled links is a great feature that any future competitor should pick up!
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.).
Edit: It's in the newsfaq page https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html per the replies
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
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.
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.
Super clear now, thank you.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.