--- title: Back to Kagi | daily.dev description: A developer returns to Kagi after a couple of months testing alternatives including Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Qwant, and a self-hosted SearxNG... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-kagi-e50v3bty8 twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Back to Kagi | daily.dev og:description: A developer returns to Kagi after a couple of months testing alternatives including Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Qwant, and a self-hosted SearxNG... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-kagi-e50v3bty8 og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/E50V3bTY8.png og:image:alt: Back to Kagi og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Back to Kagi **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 2 min read · 3 upvotes · 1 comments ## Summary A developer returns to Kagi after a couple of months testing alternatives including Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Qwant, and a self-hosted SearxNG instance. Google proved disappointing due to AI-heavy, media-cluttered results. SearxNG suffered from rate-limiting and inconsistent quality. None of the alternatives matched Kagi's result relevance, summarize/translate features, or CSS customization options. The experience reinforced appreciation for Kagi's privacy focus and text-first search results. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 433 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-07-23). **TL;DR:** The community is broadly positive about Kagi as a search product, praising its customization, privacy, and quality over Google, but there's significant debate about pricing tiers and the 300-search limit, plus a recurring philosophical argument about whether web content quality—not Google's choices—is the root cause of search degradation. **Sentiment:** 45% positive · 35% mixed · 20% skeptical **The case for** - Kagi's ability to block sites, boost others, and use vim keybinds gives users meaningful control over their search experience. - The SlopStop feature helps filter LLM-generated spam sites across all devices account-wide. - Several users report finding answers on Kagi that colleagues searching Google simultaneously could not find. - Family plan cost-splitting makes the $10/month price more palatable for some users. - Kagi's account-wide blocklist syncs across devices, unlike per-browser solutions. **The pushback** - The 300-search limit on the $5 plan is seen as too restrictive by heavy users, with many reporting 1,000–2,500+ monthly searches. - Kagi relies on third-party search indexes (Brave, Yandex, SerpAPI) rather than its own full index, raising sustainability and independence concerns. - SlopStop report processing has been slow and inconsistent, with many valid reports rejected. - There is no option to exclude specific upstream providers (e.g., Yandex) from contributing to results. - Subscription fatigue: $10/month feels steep when stacked against many other $10/month services. **By community** - hackernews (mixed): Commenters are genuinely enthusiastic about Kagi's search quality and customization but are divided on pricing tiers, the 300-search cap, reliance on third-party indexes, and whether Kagi can truly solve the underlying problem of a degraded web. **Hottest debate:** Whether search quality has declined primarily because Google made deliberate bad product/ad-revenue decisions, or because the open web itself has become lower quality—with commenters citing leaked emails on one side and the rise of social media walled gardens on the other. **Open questions** - Will Kagi ever build a sufficiently large independent index to stop relying on Brave/Yandex/SerpAPI? - Why does Kagi not offer a reasonably priced unlimited-search tier without AI extras? - Can SlopStop scale to effectively filter AI-generated content if report review remains slow and inconsistent? - Is there any plan to let users opt out of specific upstream search providers for privacy reasons? **Highlights** > Yep, in my one month paid trial I hit 300 after about 2 weeks, and I was being conscious of when I used it vs other engines. I'd probably clear 1000 if I wasn't. Their claims of "most people don't use 300+" has an EXTREME survivorship bias. I'd happily pay the base price if it weren't so limited - maybe if I wasn't subsidizing the LLM? Instead I just cancelled. > — [Groxx on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49016226) > Just to add another data point to this, 300 would absolutely not be enough for me. Here's my usage stats: Jul 2026 939 Jun 2026 1,317 May 2026 1,924 Apr 2026 2,537 Mar 2026 2,183 Feb 2026 2,038 Jan 2026 2,392 > — [neysofu on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49007263) > I've subscribed to Kagi for three of years now. Kagi is still great, but it doesn't feel like "Google ten years ago" anymore. I don't think it is because Kagi got worse, rather it is the web that has become worse. The content nowadays kinda sucks. > — [o\_m on hackernews · 5 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006528) > I don't buy this at all. There is no way for any search provider to avoid the arms race dynamic. Marketers will always have an incentive to appear first in results in order to capture an audience to monetize. "Just win the arms race then" sounds nice but it's wishful thinking, IMO. And I don't even think this is the primary issue with the web sucking. The web is just an entirely different thing than it was during the period we're all nostalgic for. I used to search for information and find it on independent pages that I never would have found without a search engine. But now that same information I used to search for is all on wikipedia, with much better citations than I used to get. And pretty much everything other use case of search is now behind some social media walled garden. IMO the web was kind of just a victim of its own success. There stopped being much incentive to put new things on the web on a huge proliferation of independent sites. (NB. This is terrible for Google! If my take on this is right, then their business model is going to eventually be in real trouble. This is another reason I'm pretty skeptical that they have caused this to happen. It's bad for them, I don't think they're happy about it at all.) > — [sanderjd on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49012726) > No, they don't, and I had a feedback request back in September 2024 about that: https://kagifeedback.org/d/4727-option-to-choose-or-exclude-... I ended up quitting Kagi over that and built my own search engine for my own use. But if the comments here are correct that Kagi are trying to build their own index that replaces all the others, that would be great news. It seems lots of people still like Kagi regardless of that too. For anyone trying to build their own, turns out SQLite can take you much further than it seems you should ever be able to. A metasearch layer fills in for everything else. > — [SyneRyder on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49017076) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49006195) · 255 points · 433 comments ## Community discussion Top comments from developers on daily.dev. **@jkdeguzman** · 0 upvotes > I might also do this soon once I get back financially. I have been evaluating and constantly changing my daily driver such as DuckDuckGo (right now), Ecosia, Startpage, and the one that I recently discovered, Dogpile (which combines Google and Bing results). ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [I ditched Google for SearXNG, and going back feels like a downgrade](https://daily.dev/posts/i-ditched-google-for-searxng-and-going-back-feels-like-a-downgrade-s45getfuj) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Using Kagi Search With Low Vision](https://daily.dev/posts/using-kagi-search-with-low-vision-miuermiyf) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [I switched to a paid search engine, and I can't believe I'll never go back to Google](https://daily.dev/posts/i-switched-to-a-paid-search-engine-and-i-can-t-believe-i-ll-never-go-back-to-google-vaozqr8m4) · XDA Developers · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Six search engines worth trying now that Google isn’t really Google anymore](https://daily.dev/posts/six-search-engines-worth-trying-now-that-google-isn-t-really-google-anymore-u7mm2kq2m) · TechCrunch · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Waiting for dawn in search: Search index, Google rulings and impact on Kagi](https://daily.dev/posts/waiting-for-dawn-in-search-search-index-google-rulings-and-impact-on-kagi-beomfhwrd) · Hacker News · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-kagi-e50v3bty8) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Back to Kagi","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-kagi-e50v3bty8","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-kagi-e50v3bty8"},"datePublished":"2026-07-22T13:35:53.416Z","dateModified":"2026-07-23T19:39:00.502Z","description":"A developer returns to Kagi after a couple of months testing alternatives including Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Qwant, and a self-hosted SearxNG...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--ZrL_HSsR--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2006","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--ZrL_HSsR--/f_auto/v1722860399/public/Placeholder%2006","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":1,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-kagi-e50v3bty8","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":3},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":1}],"keywords":"privacy","timeRequired":"PT2M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"Back to Kagi"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/back-to-kagi-e50v3bty8","comment":[{"@type":"Comment","text":"I might also do this soon once I get back financially. I have been evaluating and constantly changing my daily driver such as DuckDuckGo (right now), Ecosia, Startpage, and the one that I recently discovered, Dogpile (which combines Google and Bing results).","datePublished":"2026-07-23T05:22:51.657Z","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/E50V3bTY8#c-eoCV5PLod","author":{"@type":"Person","name":"JK de Guzman","url":"https://daily.dev/jkdeguzman","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/s--15vmoSTP--/f_auto/v1734642358/avatars/avatar_FTHcFQTYt5SEz7JCuuSPq"}}]} ```