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Comment by ClaraForm | Hacker News Reader

Lately I haven't been very happy with Kagi. A few searches have completely failed for me returning a blank page when both DuckDuckGo and Google had a response. The Kagi translate on/off switch made me think their services are unreliable. Then this happens and it feels like more that their word is unreliable. They expanded into too many domains and spread themselves too thin and that doesn't give me confidence.

My subscription is up for renewal in December and I think I actually have a decision to make. For now I'm very happy with the Kagi MCP for my research agent. But I'm definitely having a moment of "how reliant should I really be on this company?"

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If you're mainly using the MCP, it could be worth making your own MCP that uses your own API keys from Brave, Mojeek & Marginalia (optionally also add Yep). For the most basic ranking, get it to group URLs that appear in more than one search engine and list those ones at the top. Your favorite AI will be able to vibe-build this all for you and give you an exe / binary you can run as an MCP that runs locally over stdio.

If you try it out, you'll either find a replacement that saves you money, or you'll at least have the makings of an escape plan if you need it later. You'll also have your own comparison data for where Kagi beats a generic metasearch, and if that difference is meaningful for you.

I dropped Kagi last year. It’s just not worth it. Search sucks no matter who is doing it and now the game has changed with agents that can search more links than I can.

I agree, searches return very often blank pages and I find myself more and more using google instead. I won't likely renew my subscription.

> They expanded into too many domains and spread themselves too thin and that doesn't give me confidence.

That's because imo there is no way to grow this bigger with a search service. Same for open source browsers, just look at Firefox instead of focusing on bugzilla and push for new web apis, they're trying very hard everything else than can be monetized

So... they shouldn't grow. There's nothing wrong with having a sustainable business doing one thing and doing it well.

Search is super valuable.

Google managed to monetize the everyday person's searches, but at the detriment of everyone that wanted to get nontrivial work done that needs in depth search.

Lots of institutions want quality search. They could index high value things, and sell them directly to businesses, universities, etc.

> Search is super valuable

It is for Google there isn’t much else we are left with

They could do nothing but marketing and maintenance, and watch as their competitors continue to make the same mistakes that drive people to Kagi in the first place.

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