Kagi: Announcing The Assistant

To repeat myself from a recent HN thread:

I've been using Kagi for a while (almost two years now!) and it's been nothing but excellent!

Lenses are very useful (Reddit lens is on every second search), and I personally really like the AI features they are working on.

The new more advanced assistant which is able to do searches, which can also be constrained to lenses, and lets you pick an arbitrary model, is excellent, and basically means I don't need a chatgpt/claude subscription, as Kagi covers it very well.

All in all, great product which I'm happy to pay for.

I love Kagi and I’m a paid user, but I’m not willing to pay $25 per month for the assistants for the following reasons: * I already pay these companies directly and wouldn’t be able to cancel these as I use the voice assistant on my phone from ChatGPT and love using the artifacts from Claude on my computer * I’m also paying raycast to access these at the touch of my keyboard and prefer to quick access use it there

I love Kagi and can’t recommend it enough. I wish I could just give them my api key for this instead of paying several different service providers for the same ai access to the same models. This is getting expensive.

After being a user for a long while, my enthusiasm for Kagi has decreased. Their UI is lovely, but I feel in the end they are just repackaging other indexers. I’ve started using Google + Ublacklist and for me it works the same. I also don’t like how much they have focused on AI, given even their Quick Answer, when it’s wrong, it does so with such confidence it makes the tool quite untrustworthy.

I do think LLMs have their place in search and I think the Kagi approach feels a lot better than Googles'. Kagi doesn't inject LLM results anywhere, but they've been making LLMs accessible in their search interface for a long while - this being the most evolved version of that effort. I am not totally sold on everything they are doing but I hate their integration of LLMs the least.

So for 25$ a month I get access to ChatGPT and Claude offerings in addition to access to Kagi search. This sounds like a good deal, compared to the 20$/month access to ChatGPT only. Or am I missing something?

"Integration with Kagi’s legendary quality search results" I don't disagree that this is useful, but I personally don't consider an assistant to be a chatbot that can tell me the weather. Assistants actively engage your daily life and do things that are usually considered tedious for people with a lack of time. Sure, that's a big ask for A.I in its current generation, but now for example I can ask Google Assistant (Gemini?) to save the shopping list I just gave it or even answer my calls in some cases. It's also certainly not the standard of human assistants, but it's closer than a chatbot.

I have been using Kagi for a while now. Something I have noticed recently is that it ignores a lot more of the words in my search queries, I felt the same thing with google over time, it shows results it thinks I want not the things I want.

I don't know how to make this more meaningful than just an anecdote, but I love the idea of Kagi but just cancelled my subscription. All the issues about google search becoming more and more useless are absolutely true, but I still continue to get much better results for most topics with Google than Kagi. Same for Kagi's LLM products compared to directly using Claude or others.

Hmmm

One feature here that I think competitors lack is that the LLM's view of search results can be constrained by Kagi's search "lens" [0] that let you exclude various categories of results.

I use Kagi but haven't dug into lenses, anyone have experience ?

I'm currently trying to write python script interfacing with outlook's mailterm interface (win32com.client) and it's annoying. I wonder if I can restrict search results to a particular domain so it only pulls from microsoft docs...

[0] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/lenses.html

I used the Kagi Ultimate subscription intensively for approximately seven months and am considering downgrading now.

While I am still happy with the search, I find the value of the assistant no longer worth it. At first, I thought I would be able to replace other providers with the wide range of offered models, but now I find myself often going to distinct providers. Kagi seems to have introduced a harsh and generalized input token limit for prompts (detached from what the underlying model can handle), which makes it almost impossible to work with code or documents. I think the VW example in the announcement makes it clear that the assistant is only intended to respond to prompts of a few sentences—searching by sentences instead of keywords. I don't see input for documents or things like code execution coming here, so the difference of $15 monthly can get me fancier features.

Mixing the output of the model with the limited content of approximately five websites (= Assistant with internet access), on average, is most of the time counterproductive for me. The sites mentioned in the sources of the output are often not sites I would usually visit or get information from (they usually don't correspond to the top results on Kagi web search). I have used search engines for decades now and have built a sort of index/pattern/feeling in my head for which site I am going to visit, which AI can not match for me.

The lenses are nice but are also pretty specialized. Most of the time I find myself just doing a broad query, which in most cases will already satisfy me.

I will definitely continue to use Kagi for search. There is no comparable search experience out there, and it makes searching definitely more effective.

I've been using Kagi for a while and I like it more that Google but I can't quite see myself paying for Kagi Assistant. I can't see myself paying for almost any pass-through AI subscriptions, I'd rather just pay for the core AI tool (ChatGPT/Claude).

This field is moving very quickly and since there will always be a lag in getting new features/models into the "wrappers" I'd rather get it from the source.

One random thing I wish Kagi could do is offer a way to promote the "official" website to the top of the search results. I have various up/down rankings applied but when I search for "DataDog" I want their official website at the top of the list, not under SO/Reddit/etc posts. If I'm searching for a problem then yes, I want those sites higher but it's slightly frustrating to have to scroll down 3-5 results to find the main website for a product/service/company. I feel like they should be able to differentiate between "search about X product" vs "X product".

This is really cool. I'm very against AI in everything, so I probably won't use this, but I'm glad that they are making it an opt-in feature and that my $10/month plan doesn't go up to support it.

This is actually really exciting for Kagi. In a lot of situations the underlying model (Claude, GPT4 etc.) isn't that exciting, it's the connection to search to retrieve and summarize recent information that's exciting.

By already having a traditional search engine this puts Kagi at a big advantage compared to someone like Perplexity, or even Claude and OpenAI who I think are all cobbling together solutions on top of Bing's API.

I appreciate that it's on a separate plan so that I don't have to interface with it.

I don't find Kagi as compelling as some other users seem to, worked about as well (read, poorly) as most other modern search engines

I've been using (and paying for) Kagi since the beginning.

For the first while, the search results were inarguably better than any alternative. I was thrilled and was recommending Kagi to anyone who'd listen. In the last six months or so, things have gone downhill. More often, my results ignore some of my search terms and I have to try to "trick" Kagi into matching them all. More often, I get only one or two pages of results when other engines give me notably more relevant hits. And more often, my search hangs or fails to return at all.

I don't care if they noodle with AI or make T-shirts as long as the search is great. What I've experienced is the search getting worse while they noodle with AI and make T-shirts, though. The two may be entirely unrelated but from an outside perspective, it feels like their core offering is suffering because of these other-than-search undertakings.

So far, I'm sticking with it, but my enthusiasm has definitely diminished. A couple of my friends have canceled their subscriptions in disappointment and I've started to consider cancelling mine, as well.

I upgraded. Using the prompt: "something cool in html css"

Mistral and GPT - Create the same example of a flip card

Gemini - Creates glowing neon text

and Claude - Produces a pulsing dot, that enlarges and shrinks and radiates a fading white shadow. That's cool.

Is there some reason Brave Search isn't more popular on this site? It already has an incredibly helpful assistant built into the search and it's free. I don't even use Brave Browser (long live Firefox!) but I feel like people are sleeping on theur search.

Paid Kagi user here. I REALLY wish Kagi would focus on it's core selling point: search. Building a search engine is hard enough. I use Kagi Search everyday and I am mostly happy with it but the product has a lot of room for improvment.

Stop launching new products (browser, summarizer, gpt, assistant) while your core product is still behind the competition in many areas.

Cool, not a feature I personally want and behind a higher priced tier than I pay for now. That seems entirely reasonable for both Kagi and for me.

No markdown blocks for code makes assistants really tough to use. It also seems to end up recommending that you search the exact same thing you ask it. For example, if I ask "name 5 websites similar to hackernews", it'll end up spitting out a link to a kagi search with "websites similar to hackernews".

I might end up disabling web search until they've tweaked it a little more. I really like kagi search so I feel pretty confident that they'll get it, but I don't think it's ready to replace the brand-name chatbots.

Isn't the point of a corporate blog to drive users to your product? Then why do the blogs never have an easy way of getting there? Clicking the logo and things in the header all just take me to the front page of the blog. Pet peeve of mine.

I honestly think FastGPT is the best implementation of AI w/search, and is extremely versatile/useful across domains (granted I don't code). I think it's the same thing as the Quick Answer feature from their standard search.

In my daily work as an MD it's become my reflexive go-to for looking up answers to specific to general, easy to complex clinical questions. I use it far more frequently than UpToDate (which is no less than the holy book of medicine), more than PubMed/Google Scholar searches, and definitely more than a basic web search (Google, only b/c it's a hassle to log in to Kagi every session at work).

Maybe 1 time out of 10 it won't give a correct or meaningful answer (in which case my prompt needs to be refined, or is just not suited for this kind of tool). But apart from that it will give me exactly what I need, because it uses Kagi search to source its answers. Kagi search does a decent job bringing to the top relevant journal articles (which in turn may mention other articles, adding indirectly to the trove of sources FastGPT pulls its final answer from). It shows the 5 search results it referenced at the bottom of the page, so more often than not if I don't get my answer in the direct summary, I have very relevant sources to read through.

I also don't think you need a Kagi account to use it.

Something I love about Kagi that isn't often known, is they will pro-rate based on days. If you are on an existing plan, you can upgrade to Ultimate, try it out for a few days, and then downgrade and only pay for the days you used it. I despise the subscription model generally, but if we're going to have it then I wish more companies would do pro-rating! Anyway, you can try it out for very low risk.

I've been curious about Kagi as a search engine for a while now and this seems like a good time to try, given that I already pay $20/month for ChatGPT.

The thing stopping me currently from trying this or Claude is I rely on the Opt+Space shortcut with the ChatGPT mac app.

Are there any other options for a native mac app with integration as good as the ChatGPT app?

I have been paying for Kagi for the past five or six months and apart from the truly niche cases where I need top of the shelf search results the majority of the time the top results are not that much different from, say, duck duck go. My other issue is that I am on the first subscription tier which currently supports 300 searches and I often find myself reaching that limit sooner that I would like. I will continue to pay for the service, but so far the, admittedly, better results haven't given me this light and day experience other users describe. Maybe I am just not using the engine to its full potential...

c-f "ai"; c-w. and onto the pile they go!

Is it still legal do do something with a computer without involving "ai"?

> You can edit the question and add that you’re working on a binary classification problem to get a more specific answer.

This mid-thread editing feature sounds really useful, I'm curious how does it work when you switch between models in the middle of a conversation?

Like, say I start with a general search question, then halfway through I want to switch to a coding model to ask something like, "Can you create a Python dictionary of the top 10 longest city names in the UK and their populations?"

Does the context carry over smoothly, or would I need to rephrase things when switching models? Wondering how it handles tasks that require different kinds of expertise without losing track of the flow.

I've been trying out the new Android app. I know it's still beta, but it sucks big time. I'm a fan and paying user of kagi, just wanted to point that out in case any kagi developer is reading :)

among other things, it randomly says I have no connectivity in an awful modal, I click to search and the keyboard doesn't open, I hit "enter" to search and nothing happens (I need to tap on the search suggestion). pretty bad so far. will try it again in a couple of weeks to see if there is any progress...

Why would i use this over perplexity pro?

I love Kagi and happily pay their $25/mo but I think it's a mistake to think of their offerings as cutting-edge AI. It's obviously limited compared to open source software (as mentioned elsewhere in this thread already) and likely more expensive than raw API calls. This isn't the "best" AI experience.

What it is though, is fast, available on all my devices, constantly upgraded, and integrated with their already excellent search engine.

When I see these sorts of announcements and read some of the comments here, it makes me worry that bad customers cause enshittification and I hope kagi stays true to their human-friendly web search product.

It's not clear from the post how to access this new assistant. The search page has no such option (not a paying user). When I run a search, I only see an LLM based summary of the results similar to Google's.

Update: I see now that they say it's not available for free users. Need to pay $25/month. Not sure why, they can offer it for free users with the cheaper models like they do now to generate a "quick answer". I'm not going to pay to try it out.

I recently tried Kagi and I struggled to see the value.

For many queries side-by-side with Startpage it delivered the same results word-for-word (sure you get a few sponsored links top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those).

For other things, it was just plain annoying, e.g. "newest $type restaurants in $large_city" half the results on the first page were from 10 years ago (e.g. dated 2014). I mean FFS I put the word "newest" in there !

They seem to have a habit of interespersing very weird Facebook links randomly in the middle of a list of results. For example I was searching for something related to a specific Prometheus function (which I explicitly named in the query, alongside the word prometheus) and Kagi insisted on interspersing the technical results with random links to Facebook pages of companies selling "girlie dresses for proms".

I approached Kagi with an open mind, but having used up the 100 free searches nothing made me say "just shut up and take my money".

Hey folks, how does Kati compare to perplexity.ai ? I have been using the latter and seems like I can’t go back to anything else. I did use magi for a while but perplexity seems crazy perfect for search and quick summaries a

The library they (probably) use for abstracting the interfaces of different LLMs they use is also open [1]:

> PyLLMs is a minimal Python library to connect to various Language Models (LLMs) with a built-in model performance benchmark.

https://github.com/kagisearch/pyllms

LLMs + search are really useful. I use phind.com regularly for this, it is remarkably good for enhanced search queries. I use Claude a lot for more general knowledge stuff but its inability to provide references or do web search like stuff holds it back.

For users of both, how does this compare to searchGPT, in terms of results quality and quantity?

What’s the incentive for websites to let Kagi and others indexing content if llms in search show relevant informations right away? Wouldn’t something like perplexity ai making more sense then? Or perhaps better application of llms to search

How does Kagi compare to Brave Search? Is it an independent index?

can you use the assistant to generate images as well?

Oof, I wanted a better google, not a worse one.

I am paying phind $20 for seemingly the same functionality. Is kagi any better?

I wonder what the limits are? Don't see any mention on the announcement page.

Stop them ads please

Annoyed this isn't available on the family plan.

the best feature is getting an llm prompt in the url bar:

how do i _ in python !chat

Another happy Kagi user here.