https://wiby.me/ is interesting. I am not sure if it updates, or if it just has old websites.

Not only that, I just clicked "Next Post" more than a hundred times, and over 90% of posts I got were about LLMs and coding agents.

And Small HN:

https://hcker.news/?smallweb=true

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46618714 (Ask HN: Share your personal website, 2414 comments)

The implicit criteria (tech/business and adjacent) is an issue with all these lists for me. But it's also a personal list, which is great. I just wish literally anyone in these had a personal interest on anything else reflected in their lists because I keep checking them and being disappointed.

A topic that's come up before on here with others doing the complaining about a list I liked for this reason but wasn't top-loaded with tech: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47015676

I’ve been using kagi for about eight months now as well and at least in Europe it’s a significantly better search engine than Google by a long shot. The results are significantly more accurate. I don’t get listicles I don’t get AI spam. I get what I’m searching for, it’s refreshing.

The assistant is a nice addition but it’s search is superior for me.

this is hard to evaluate, but we cannot replicate the old web search experience not just of Google, but Altavista, Lycos or Yahoo, when most of the web is siloed and increasingly botted - simply because the stuff you see in the siloed internet is actively "protected" out of your control

perhaps the best we can do is this "small web" thing which can be seen as some sort of retrofuturistic solution, but of course the siloed internet is a black hole of content and effort, and of course if the small web gets enough traction, astroturfed generative AI content will target it

I've been using Kagi for ~18months and your description doesn't match my experience at all.

Querying for something like "snowflake json from variant?" in both engines and in google I get a sort-of-right-but-not-really-that-helpful ai summary about "parse_json" function. In Kagi I get an actually useful summary with code examples of parse_json, but also the colon-based syntax for accessing values inside nested objects without needing to parse anything.

I very rarely need to go into a page, I use Kagi quick search summary with the "?" suffix and it almost always gives me a useful answer in one-shot.

I switched about a year ago. At the time it did seem like a step up from Google results. But there's been an increasing prevalence of low quality results. Blogspam, AI websites, etc. Obviously not blaming Kagi here, web search has gotten hard recently.

Is Kagi still better than Google? Probably, I don't really know because I don't use Google anymore. But at this point I feel like I'm with them out of inertia more than being an avid supporter. One of these days I'll re-evaluate Google and decide whether to switch back or not.

It does occasionally surface interesting results from small sites that you wouldn't get on Google. I do find that to be useful.

Kagi definitely isn't a bad search engine by any means. Honestly if you haven't used it, try the 100 search free trial on one device. Maybe you'll like it. This feels more like a general decline of the open web.

Off topic, but ref

"I remember when you could half-remember a comment from a website, type that into Google, and get taken to the article you were looking for"

It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... (Could even be restricted based on viewport - I don't think it's that crazy of an idea)

I know there's a a number of third party programs which does though. Of course - multi-device being the norm - complicates things.

The only thing that seems to have gotten a lot worse is the trend of ai articles- which isn't kagi's fault but it would be nice if they could figure out how to filter them. They all follow the same patter- "specific thing you want" with a table of contents with loads of repeated chapters and unrelated information, spattered with effectively random images.

First of all, the parent comment's point is that Kagi is often be praised for being like so-called-old-Google[0]. So it's only reasonable to assume they only care about the links, not the LLM summary. What you described is even further from old Google.

Second, if you want this kind of LLM-digested search result, Google AI studio blows everything out of water (including Google search, obviously).

[0] I've never bought into the idea that old Google was so much better. But it seems to be a very popular opinion on HN. ymmv.

Try g.ai. It's stupid fast and uses google indexes. Kagi? sometimes doesn't correctly parse intent, in Google thing you can just ask function doing this and gives you it, with examples, grounding and extremely fast. I'm paying for kagi since the begging and I guess id cancel it because it gives not so much added value

I've been using it for 2.5 years at this point, and have the same experience. I don't think it's hopeless, but Kagi will need to step up their methods. IMO, there's actually a lot they can do here.

> no brainer to index what the user have actually seen... I know there's a a number of third party programs which does though

Which company would you trust with this kind of deep surveillance information on you though?

They’re starting to with their stopslop. Sites that are mostly ai content get flagged and deranked. Still not perfect and I think they only just started working on the backlog of reports so hopefully it holds up helping.

Kagi uses Google (and other) indexes.

The main usecase for Kagi is the fact that you can personally uprank/downrank/pin/block sites. And it has a bunch of creature comforts built in like:

- Attempting to detect AI slop, concatenating listicles ("10 best ...") under one search result heade

- Attempting to block translated Reddit results

- Custom lenses that search only coding resources or recipes or whatnot

- Redirects (so x.com > xcancel.com), although I feel this should be a browser feature

- Better translate than Google

There's probably a few things I'm forgetting.

Kagi is abysmal at image search though. Just assume you will have to use Google for that.

For needle-in-the-haystack searches, I find longer quotes works really well (in Kagi or google)

Kagi value proposition for me is not the $5 search but the $10 search plus whatever AI chat model you want (I originally did ultimate when I used it for coding). Controllable search and chat satisfies all my one-shot needs.

I can't really blame Kagi for the web getting bad or for the weak market for secondary search. Part of me wonders if they could use the AI search tools now on the market (now getting lots of investment) instead of the human indexes (subject to monopoly control).

I've been using it for over 2 years now. I'm quite happy with it. I like that I don't see adds and my searches aren't being used to target ads against me.

Yes, SU was fascinating at the time. I kind of like this style of exploring the web; it gets a bit addictive, you spend hours on it but end up finding interesting content and other stuff that you wouldn't otherwise.

SU was amazing. Stumbling upon Ze Frank? It was internet gold!

Im surprised nobody has mentioned cloudhiker which is made to be like stumbleupon.

yeah, same happened to me, the first site I was sent to was a list of people sending in random "sunday thoughts" (or whatever it was called) on (actual physical) postcards which then got scanned and posted. There were some good things in there. Now I can't find that site again because I didn't realize it was randomized...

I think the problem is that it's hard to curate feeds in a language you don't understand. I've been building an uncurated index of OPML blogrolls, with no language restriction. The OPML blogrolls are curated by their owners, so someone decided they met some inclusion criteria, but the overall list is uncurated.

https://alexsci.com/rss-blogroll-network/

But then you're not using kagi search just the LLM

Everyone has to answer for themselves why they would be OK with Google hoovering up their data in order to deliver substandard results, vs Kagi actively working to remove low-quality results all while collecting no personal data.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience. In my experience, Kagi used to be great... then it became good... and now it's "better than Google".

"Better than Google" and the fact that I can choose websites to exclude from my search results are two features that I remain willing to pay for, however.

I feel the same way. I'm probably going to end my subscription at some point, but right now the effort involved is what's keeping me with Kagi.

>It's funny to me that (to my knowledge) no browser (mainstream?) implement this functionality yet. Seems like a no brainer to index what the user have actually seen...

The answer to this is complicated.

Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor, but not for the user.

The choice to not implement this for the user is very deliberate. It's contrary to the vendor's interests if the browser provides this capability directly to users. If a user's browser can take you to a website directly, then you are not using the vendor's search engine, meaning you are not looking at their ads, paid search results, algorithm, etc. It would severly impact their business model.

This is also the reason why browsers have:

- Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate address bar and search bar.

- Implement only basic hierarchical organization for browser Favorites.

Directly and indirectly, Google is the central nexus of all modern browsers. Aside from Google Chrome, they also:

- Fund the vast majority of Firefox.

- Pay Apple for preferential treatment.

- Provide the same mechanisms to vendors who base their browsers on Chromium (i.e., Microsoft Edge, Brave).

I would love for this to not be the case. There is hope to be found in small independent browser and search companies/projects.

It’s definitely not Kagi’s fault. The AI slop is simply taking effect and I feel sorry for them. I never expected them to match Google’s quality, but I was impressed with how close it was when I used it a few years ago.

There are things like Mymind (SaaS) or Karakeep (selfhosted) that do this, though they require you to explicitly save the pages instead of indexing everything by default

If only some operating system incorporated a way to make everything you've seen on your computer locally searchable, wouldn't that be a neat feature?

That's called search: in history.

I really loved Kagi and was a paid customer for close to two years. But sadly this year I wont be renewing my plan.

Kagi made search feel just “right” it was simple, got the job done and had some really simple but cool search features.

But over time they started doing way too much, and I kept seeing more and more features that I really didn't want. It felt like I was paying for all this while I just wanted to type something on to a text box and click search and see a bunch of results organized according to my filters.

I wish they would just dump all the other nonsense projects like ai and just focus on search only. Or give me an option to pay for search only without any limits.

I'm extremely confused by these comments. Are we all using the same google? Just to make sure I wasn't crazy I just did a search on Google and 1/2 the page was a combination of google AI result and ads. Below that there were 2.5 links visible. One reddit result, and two blogspam.

The exact same search on Kagi ('best lllm for coding') nets reddit, hacker news, and some other forum results right at the top, followed by a long dense list of links to various sites (including some of the same blogspam of course), but over all the results are hugely more rich and varies and also not at all the same.

How can you possibly say that a site that gives you 50% ads and a bunch of low quality links is remotely "only a little better" than a site that gives you zero ads and a huge number of better quality links?

Yes. I use both (Google only at work) and Kagi is certainly no worse and comes with the massive benefit of simply not being Google. It's worth paying for for that reason alone, even if the engineers at Google are constantly working on making sure I'm tracked anyway.

DuckDuckGo allows you to blacklist websites for free

> Adopted Google Chrome's "Omnibar" instead of a separate address bar and search bar.

On the other hand, the additional tools in the Omnibar (calculator is the example most should be familiar with) makes the bar incredibly useful for random daily tasks. Also, it seems that there is an "omnibox" API that extensions can use, which allows them to add their own tools to the omnibar/omnibox. Would be interesting as a form of "assistant" in a way.

> Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. Behind the scenes, both will upload your browser history to the cloud. You can see it in network packet captures. It's implemented in the browser for the vendor, but not for the user.

Citation needed... (I'm talking about the page *content*, not the metadata like url and title)

I haven't used this but looks someone created a self hosted version of Microsoft's Recall

https://github.com/openrecall/openrecall

Kagi used to use Google's search API. They discuss the current state of their index here: https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search

I think you would need to take it a step further and do full-text search on loaded pages. It's certainly possible but probably pretty data intensive.

I would really like to see integration between Karakeep and SearXNG so that I could combine online search engine results with my self-hosted bookmarks serice.

No, the responses are backed by searches.

I'm glad to see this comment and the parent comment and the grandparent comment voted so near the top. I've had the same experience.

I honestly would love to be able to give my Kagi key to the ChatGPT or Claude clients (or more realistically, configure a proxy) just to have it be their primary tool for searches—respecting my site rankings/lists

Is usage based pricing available?

I'm thinking of trying it out Kagi, but adding another monthly commitment is what's holding me back.

A single credit top-up and occasional usage until the credits run out sounds good to me.

"the effort involved"

Feels like your comment saying it was too much effort to cancel Kagi took more effort than cancelling Kagi.

>Both Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge actually implement this. [...] both will upload your browser history to the cloud.

I'm fairly certain I've caught Firefox doing something similar (regularly sending multiple tens of MB to Google servers in the background.)

> both will upload your browser history to the cloud

I wonder if the EU could fine them a couple weeks of revenue for this. Seems illegal.

I believe there some projects trying this now using OCR IIRC.

Did even Microsoft try something like this? It's of course something you'd only want running locally

That doesn't search the content of the pages you've browsed, though, right?

I’m confused by this comment. The original comments talk about Kagi not living up to the hype. You say you’ve had the same experience and wish you could get LLMs to use Kagi for web searches?

Actually their payment model has some baked in niceness.

If you don't use the service in a month, they just refund you. This has kept me from unsubscribing for years now. Some months I use it, some I don't.

It's more of hassle to unsub, and re-sub again when I want.

Edit: Kagi has a starter plan with 100 free searches: https://kagi.com/pricing

Also, from the Kagi privacy pass FAQ at https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-privacy-pass#faq:

    *Do you plan to allow purchasing privacy pass tokens without having an account?*

    Yes, this makes sense. This is possible because technically the extension does not care if you have an account or not. It just needs to be 'loaded' with valid tokens. And you can imagine a mechanism where you could also anonymously purchase them, eg. with monero, without ever creating an account at Kagi. Let us know *here* ( https://kagifeedback.org/d/6163-kagi-privacy-pass )  if you are excited about this, as it will help prioritize it.

Personally I don't like being signed in during searches, this seems like a good solution.

So fwiw, browsing history shouldn’t be anywhere near that big making it unlikely there what it was. It compresses well, if they were to do it I’m sure they’d do it at regular intervals instead of a years’ worth at a time, etc.

And, of course, Firefox is open source and this wouldn’t be kept a secret.

Right, I misunderstood the case.

I guess because it isn't then trivial for a web browser to do, indexing every text ever rendered?

So some guy does hard work developing some technique or solving some problem. He documents his experience, puts up a tutorial on DO or AWS or somewhere else, and the ads on that document help offset the cost of hosting. Now comes along Kagi, scrapes that data, and presents it to you, their paying customer.

I see a problem with this.

I'm 80%+ sure the claim is BS

I think the joke is that Microsoft did do something very like this -- they call it Windows Recall -- and it got a lot of angry pushback. (Partly, IIRC, because the specific way they did it initially was very bad in terms of security and privacy, but I think a lot of people quite understandably don't trust them to implement it (a) the way they claim they do or (b) competently, so even after they made a bunch of changes aimed at making it less scary it's still viewed with a lot of hostility.)

I do agree actually but I’m sticking with them. Their mission of ending slop but also pushing ai tools seem at odds. On one hand they’re marketing to the anti ai crowd while also joining the ai hype? It’s weird.

Do you pay LLM providers for agentic features? From your past submissions, you certainly seem to. Do those features make web searches and curl the results?

Were the models underlying those features trained on all available web content, or are they unlike any other enterprise models out there?

At any rate, you should see a bigger problem in what Google does, which you don't seem to.

Ah :wooosh:, :D

It's not BS for the people who don't understand the dark patters that guide users to enabling all of this stuff. That's everyone with a Windows PC who didn't bypass the Microsoft account requirement and went with all of the defaults in Microsoft Edge. Everyone using Chrome Enterprise/Education whose Google Workspace admins don't want to get into trouble for not backing up people's stuff (i.e., sharing it all with Google). Same goes for company Windows PCs set up with Microsoft Entra ID. It's everyone with an Android device and a Google account who wants their settings backed up or transfers to a new Android device. It's in the fine print and legalese for all of these products and services.