Ask HN: Why do you trust Kagi?

monroewalker · 2025-02-25T22:12:35.000Z

I frequently see high praise for Kagi here, both for the quality of the search results as well as the ostensibly customer-friendly business decisions.For the people that use their search and trust the company - why? Not to say I don’t trust them or trust them less than any other company claiming to be privacy and security focused, just would like to know how others made their decision.The obvious strawman argument seems to be that since they charge for search, their business model is based on subscriptions rather than monetizing search data. Nothing would stop a company from charging for search AND selling data

ambivalence 1 year ago |

Not sure how much "trust" I actually need there. It's mostly convenience for me where it's easy to kill results from websites you never want to see again. This process allows for getting terrific results real quick after you start using it. Also not having ads is great, because you know the result ordering isn't affected by that, and your ad blocker won't be breaking your experience every now and then.

On top of that it's pretty fast and the price is right.

JohnFen 1 year ago |

What's to trust? Either a search engine gives me useful results or it doesn't. Of all the search engines I've tried, I get the best results from Kagi.

As to data collection, I appreciate their claims a lot, but "trust" is a relative term. I think it's very unlikely that they're less trustworthy than companies such as Google. It's likely that they're more so. But even if they aren't, I'm not in a worse position than I would be if I didn't use them.

barnabee 1 year ago |

I don't particularly trust Kagi but I will always prefer something that I can pay for, which has no ads, over anything funded by advertising and monetising my data.

laacz 1 year ago |

Their stance on Ukraine is bothering me. If not that, I’d be trusting them 100%. Had to revoke all recommendations and start actively point out to others this.

amazingman 1 year ago | |

What is their stance on Ukraine?

laacz 1 year ago | | |

They have Yandex integration for which they pay a fee. Yandex is owned by Russia and financially contributing to its invasion into Ukraine. When pointed out [1] their repsonse essentially was "Any good search engine remains unimpressed by world politics".

There is no way of opting out for people who care.

[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/5445-reconsider-yandex-integratio...

mkbkn 1 year ago | | |

USA has actively participated in overthrowing democracies around the world. Not to mention killing thousands of common people in Middle East and elsewhere. But the same emotions doesn't rise here. Too much hypocrisy?

laacz 1 year ago | | |

You are very welcome to bring this topic up as a separate discussion. But currently this is whataboutism.

bawis 1 year ago | |

I would love people to have the same level of bother when it comes to products and companies who supported the genocide committed by Zionists against the people of Gazza/The west bank.

dns_snek 1 year ago |

I don't trust Kagi (any more than I trust any random stranger). I was an early customer but I stopped using it because I really disliked the idea of my search activity being permanently tied to my identity.

I read that they added a privacy pass feature that supposedly makes the two unlinkable, so I'll take another look soon.

P.S. On the topic of search engines, Brave Search has improved a lot over the past 2 years. I still think it's lagging behind Google a bit, specifically when it comes to local results in non-English speaking countries, but back then I couldn't even reliably use it look up programming docs. Kudos.

jjice 1 year ago |

Ah, I think you may have most of your interest in the privacy aspects, but I personally lean more on the results.

I'd say I have faith that they're doing the right thing, but it's by no means the reason I use their platform. If privacy is your main goal, I understand the hesitancy. I'm not sure how one would prove privacy (maybe that new feature they had with tokens unassociated with an account), but that would be very interesting.

bigfatkitten 1 year ago |

I pay for the quality of their search results. I don't place any special trust in them.

This is not because I have a reason to consider them untrustworthy; I work on the assumption that we have reached peak enshittification, and that everyone on the web is selling my data.

f30e3dfed1c9 1 year ago | |

oh I don't think we've reached peak enshittification yet, not by a long shot

daveoc64 1 year ago |

Trust isn't really a factor I'm concerned about.

The quality of results is good and I can customise it more than any other search engine to suit my needs.

palata 1 year ago |

For one, I would like to see competition, because I believe that it may help the enshittification problem. We need regulations and a sane amount of competition. So I'm happy to help smaller search engines survive as a business.

Second, Kagi has implemented privacy pass: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html. So there is actually a way to use Kagi in a way that they cannot track you. This is very neat.

drakonka 1 year ago |

I do not. I've stopped subscribing since I learned they use Yandex.

toomuchtodo 1 year ago |

Because they’re not Google.

Spooky23 1 year ago |

It’s like 2008 Google. Even if they did monetize, it has the usefulness of 2008 Google.

colesantiago 1 year ago |

You should never trust Kagi, it is funded by investors and VCs, so eventually it will succumb to platform decay or “enshittification” for lack of a better word.

The investors would want a return on their investment soon, so you should start questioning your honeymoon period with Kagi if you’re using it.

https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round

JohnFen 1 year ago | |

If/when Kagi becomes worse than the alternatives, then I'll switch to an alternative. No big deal, switching search engines is pain-free.

In the meantime, I'll continue to enjoy being able to actually find stuff on the web again.

carlosjobim 1 year ago | |

> The investors would want a return on their investment soon

Investors have no say on how the company is run at this stage and frankly no right to anything from Kagi until they get a company valuation from selling actual shares. That's how SAFE notes work. And the founder will probably still have more shares than all VC investors combined after that.

Also, literally everything you use in daily life is made by companies who have investor backing. They are people, just like you. Some are greedy without limit just like most people, some just want to invest in quality companies with healthy business models. That's a proven concept for long-term returns.

colesantiago 1 year ago | | |

I'll repeat:

> Investors would want a return on their investment soon.

This doesn't change the fact that Kagi is funded by VCs and the product will become a victim to product decay or "enshittification".

> Also, literally everything you use in daily life is made by companies who have investor backing.

Uh, No?

There are many 100% bootstrapped companies that don't succumb to this and are funded by just making money, even I have one.

carlosjobim 1 year ago | | |

Your argument isn't helped by repeating it. The VC investors have zero leverage over Kagi, since the investment is in the form of SAFE notes. So they cannot force any schedule for return on their investments.

All initial investments into a new business are VC investments, so you're basically saying that any company who has taken investments is going to become a bad business. Which is just not reality. My local grocery store was built by venture investments from the local community. You have to learn and look up the word definitions. The people here on HN have no clue what venture capital is.

A 100% boot strapped company is common when it comes to smaller businesses, but any larger venture will have investor backing. I also have a 100% boot strapped business, but I'm not building factories or international brands.