It should never be by default. I like the way Kagi handles it, you have to invoke it.
this post was submitted on 10 Mar 2026
724 points (98.1% liked)
Good News Everyone
4064 readers
242 users here now
A place to post good news and prevent doom scrolling!
Rules for now:
- posts must link from a reliable news source
- no reposts
- paywalled articles must be made available
- avoid politics & schadenfreude
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
I switched to Kagi too. Definitely worth $10 to be able to search with some sanity again.
Here's hoping it lasts for a year or two before falling to enshitification or google.
I prefer searX
Does Kagi have its own Index? Or is it just masking Google/Bing like DDG or Startpage?
They use a mixed index with a lot of different sources. (mentioned here)
They have direct licensing deals with Mojeek, Brave, Yandex, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Apple, and Wolphram Alpha, which they claim is under "FRAND" ("Fair, Reasonable, And Non-Discriminatory") terms, with them retaining the ability to "reorder and blend results." (which is kinda their whole thing)
As for Google and Bing, they have to use third parties to get their search data, since:
Bing: Their terms didn’t work for us from the start. Microsoft’s terms prohibited reordering results or merging them with other sources - restrictions incompatible with Kagi’s approach. In February 2023, they announced price increases of up to 10x on some API tiers. Then in May 2025, they retired the Bing Search APIs entirely, effective August 2025, directing customers toward AI-focused alternatives like Azure AI Agents.
Google: Google does not offer a public search API. The only available path is an ad-syndication bundle with no changes to result presentation - the model Startpage uses. Ad syndication is a non-starter for Kagi’s ad-free subscription model.
They also run their own "Small Web Index", which prioritizes smaller sites, independently operated personal blogs, comic sites, small YT channels, things like that.
You can see some of that index on its own here. I don't often see it pop up for a lot of my searches, but I'd say maybe 1 in 20 to 1 in 50 of my searches have something that is clearly ranked from there higher in my search results, that I actually end up clicking on, that is almost always more reliable than all the other sources on the topic. It's usually most prevalent for programming/system setup related terms since there's a lot of programmers and sysadmins with their own personal blogs.
I've found they rank fediverse sites higher than Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Ecosia do, though I don't know if that's just their general search ranking or if that's part of the smallweb index. Again, usually much more relevant and useful than other sites or even Reddit when they do appear.
Thanks a ton! Super insightful.
load more comments
(2 replies)
I wish they'd add a non-subscription-based plan. I'd like to just buy a pack of searches and not have to worry about them expiring.
load more comments
(2 replies)
Money bags over there. Paying for search engines, la ti da.
I don’t pay for search. Don’t be ridiculous.
My butler does it for me.
Go figure that people using an alternative search engine to avoid Google would be the kind of people wanting to avoid AI.
AI integration is almost never due to public demand.
(the ai being crammed down our throats is solely due to all of the billionaires who desperately need to discredit blackmail videos)
Thus, most of the eco-harmful data center usage is for providing answers that are ignored.
Summary created by Smart Answers AI
My dude, read the room.
The AI is autistic
The type of ai I want in a search is one that runs on the indexing to detect ai slop written sites and drops them to the bottom of the search results.
I just want to know if pineapple is poisonous for my dog. I don’t need paragraphs upon paragraphs of slop about what a dog is, what poison is, what a pineapple is, a hallucinated history lesson on how dogs came to be, the nutritional benefits of fruits in general, then ending off with how apples are not only safe for humans to eat, but they are delicious as well.
Send these websites to the shadow realm.
This is the sort of information that is fucking impossible to find nowadays. There was a sweet spot from like 2001-2016 where you could easily find a reliable answer to that sort of question
Ironically, the AI summary solves this exact problem in many cases. “How do I do ?” — “You do to achieve ” — “Oh, right” (closes the tab instead of reading about the history of ).
Of course, I wouldn't trust it with life-altering situations, and neither would I trust random blogs. I'd consult some kinda dog-oriented WebMD.
load more comments
(4 replies)
The type of AI I want one that runs locally and blocks ads. But it blocks them pretending that they showed correctly and feeds useless bullshit to trackers.
Is anyone working on that?
The SEO spam was bad before AI. AI just made it worse.
I hate it, it has made every photo and piece of art a chore for me, I obsessively check over and over I wait for death
This was from months ago. I thought it was weird when I saw the title I thought are they doing a new poll? But no this articles from January. Believe me everyone on Lemmy saw this when it first happened.
You don't say? What a shocker.
And yet it’s on by default.
I use DDG. I know I can turn off the AI summaries, but sometimes they’re useful for gaming stuff.
Most of the time the ai answers are atrociously wrong. I'd rather search around then see lies, tyvm.
I don't even trust ai to tell me the release date on movies...
load more comments
(1 replies)
Probably 1 in 50 searches, I find that AI adds some value. Nothing that I couldn't work around, but it can save 2 or 3 additional searches and sometimes it gives better links than the main search does.
Usually my searches are good enough to give me the answer in the first few results.
Whenever I see AI pop up and I don't need it, I just feel like it's a huge waste. I do have it turned off on DDG.
The AI generated search blurb is annoying but easy to scroll past (I usually use a cookieless browser so the dismissal option doesn’t work from session to session). What really annoys me are the AI generated websites that pop up as search results. All of them are formatted basically the same so it’s easy to spot after clicking in, but that wastes a lot of time vs previously being able to just scan the preview text.
If you use DDG, set up a search source with the url https://noai.duckduckgo.com/ Then you can have no ai and no cookies.
This worked! Very excited to stop having to see that, thanks!
In case anyone else runs across this I chose “add a search engine” in my browser and used the address above plus “search/?q=%s” and it works like a charm:)
For me, I only use AI search if I can't find the answer I'm looking for in the first page of the results and I'm good with accepting a "guess" over a definitive source.
On Kagi with AI off by default it's a matter of just appending a ? to the end of my search query. I have done this 3-4 times in total. I average about 1,000 searches/month.
I don't want Ai but want some deterministic answers. For example "12+20" should return 32, I don't need paragraphs explaining. What is the hex color code for red? FF0000. What is - 40 degrees c in f? This one is easy as it's - 40.
I don't want paragraphs explaining this stuff. I don't want it telling me how much of a math genius I am. Just give me the answer.
Things that have multiple answers like "what are good Scifi books" or "how do I write fizz buzz in c" send me to other sites.
I'm not sure if you are aware, but "12+20," "color picker red," and "what is -40 degrees c in f" already give you the answers you want in DuckDuckGo without needing to click on a search result.
Things that have multiple answers like "what are good Scifi books" or "how do I write fizz buzz in c" send me to other sites.
Problem is that a casual search is already impossible because the internet is already an AI wasteland. There is mostly Reddit, Wikipedia and forums left to look for real answers. Everything else is already pages after pages of AI slob. I'm not gonna wade through this. So it's "reddit best scifi books" or I just get the AI result and take it to Wikipedia.
My sister is part of the 10%. The fucked up thing is that she's not an idiot. But she truly believes that AI in search is a net benefit. I just don't get it.
It certainly adds convenience when you want quick answers. But the road to dystopia is convenient.
It's wrong so often that it just adds useless padding I have to scroll down from, since I always have to look it up myself to get the correct info anyway.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I agree but the ethics prevents me from doing it.
Exactly my point.
load more comments
(3 replies)
AI search has helped me find quick answers to some mundane things like how many grams in a cup so I can see some mild benefit there, but it’s still not something I feel like I need to find those answers. I’d also never trust it looking up anything important.
It's absolutely terrible with mundane things like that. It will find someone converting quantities of flour in US vs EU recipes, and use that same conversion for milk, or molten lead. But it fail to provide the original "flour" context, and expresses the resulting conversion with absolute confidence.
And because it is such a mundane piece of information, we tend to accept it without bothering to actually verify it.
load more comments
(3 replies)
I don’t want automatic AI on my search, but for some questions I do prefer AI, would be nice to have the option and not have AI slop on every single search
load more comments
(1 replies)
I'd like it more if it actually read the sources it gives and copied an answer from them (google used to do this before LLMs)
a couple examples of it not reading the sources it provides
BY doesn't stand for anything*, unlike the other letter pairs in CC licenses. Neither of the pages listed as a source mention this, and wikipedia (the third result) specifically says it's not an abbreviation
Neither of the sources given say this, they only talk about heavy metals in protein powders
*The definition of 'stands for' that I've always heard refers specifically to acronyms. Notably, wiktionary disagrees with me here, but if you also disagree with me then that reveals another example:
(Neither of the pages mention the meaning of "stands for", though wikipedia does use it to refer to acronyms)
view more: next ›