Most promoted and blocked domains on Kagi
196 comments
·March 27, 2025fumufumufumu
OuterVale
I think it is also a consideration that more technically inclined users are more likely to spend time tailoring their experience in this way.
Technical users also likely have specific sites (namely documentation) that they wish to bump in their results where other professions might not.
I'm not disagreeing with your point, just offering some thoughts of my own.
harrall
I think it’s more word of mouth because many professions use the Internet and could surely make use of site preferences.
To be honest, I’ve only heard of Kagi on HN and nowhere in any of my friend groups.
yellowapple
> Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered?
Why would it mean that their days are numbered? Nothing wrong with having steady income from a loyal customer-base, even if that customer-base is niche.
globular-toast
It would mean that if they are operating at a loss and hoping to capture more of the market later. But if they're profitable then the main danger is a competitor coming along.
Growth mindset is a big part of our sick society, unfortunately. It's the only thing our politicians like to talk about, after all. Being a stable business delivering value is as good as dead.
whazor
Kagi is the only paid search engine and they are already profitable: https://blog.kagi.com/what-is-next-for-kagi
I think the bigger danger is the competition around AI chat assistants. There are other paid assistants, but you already see that even the paid assistants are getting trained to promote certain corporations.
freehorse
Because devs (or maybe just web devs?) will be replaced by AI soon, I guess.
edit I do not agree with this, but this is what i assume OP was referring to? Because right now web devs is a quite populous and active crowd.
johnisgood
Someone still has to write the prompts though, someone who knows what he is doing.
chillfox
The average internet user is never going to pay for search. Trying to target them would likely be a mistake.
carlosjobim
The average person is far more willing to pay for anything computer-wise than the average software developer / hacker.
Or how about the average knowledge worker? There's hundreds of millions of them.
doublerabbit
I am an average internet user.
I pay for Kagi and it's refreshing to actually see real results rather than sponsored slop from the others.
orphea
I am an average internet user.
tonyhart7
[flagged]
gxs
Not every business sets out to be the next Google
Loyal Kagi customer here, based on their posts and in my dealings with them, they are doing their thing and doing well
They are focused on privacy, do a great job of it, and their AI assistant is top notch (highly recommend you take a look, can choose from many models and swap out responses instantly, not even getting into the awesome search features)
Not commenting on your (good) who is the main audience question, rather the other point about if Kagi is doing well
I subscribed my girlfriend to it as well and tell people whenever the moment is appropriate
Really rooting for these guys to succeed long term
As an aside, when I got my Kagi subscription the first thing I did was lower Pinterest results
ipaddr
I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account. Duckduckgo is more known for privacy and searches well through tor.
Here are the stats: https://kagi.com/stats
How many are paid vs trial accounts?
We know family doesn't offer a trial nor teams.
126 teams x 5 or 6 members = 1,000 accounts at 10 per day 10k
4500 family plans: most will take the 20 a month plan 100k
45000 individuals lets say they are all paid most on the 5 dollar plans lets assume on average 6.50 is earned 300k
Then you have orion+ members at 2000 giving an extra $15 per account. 30k
They probably make 450k a month
They have 19 employees on linkedin and they are listed at under 50 everywhere else. Lets give them 25 employees at 100k average salary which would be 2.5 million in salaries which might be low.
Add on costs to actually run the website (paid search, servers, office costs) which hopefully cost less than 3.5 million.. the rest is profit.
I'd say they are doing well enough. My average of 5/6 per team might be much higher if they have a few 100+ sized teams. I think the mode would be 5/6 regardless of the average.
Semaphor
> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one.
I don’t use it, but the Privacy Pass [0] thing should actually make it great for privacy if you care more about that than personalization.
almyk
> I hear a lot of good things about kagi but privacy isn't one. They need to record every search and connect it to your account.
Looking at their privacy policy they state the following:
> We may store web requests made by user browser temporarily, with strict retention periods, for debugging purposes, and in a manner that they are not linked to an account.
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richardw
That’s a great segment to target. I’d take that any day over most others. It’s also a pretty hard bunch to please, so pretty defensible unless you somehow beat Kagi by a lot.
It’s also much bigger than their customer base. Keep going, Kagi.
Semaphor
> I'm guessing it's not just any software devs, is web developers specifically that use Kagi.
I do both, and I have MDN pinned. The thing is, if I search for C#, Python, Java, I get great results on any search engine. If I search for web stuff, I get tons of crap and mediocrity. MDN is almost always what I want instead of some other stuff.
Regarding "days numbered", I agree with the gist of the other replies ;)
xigoi
I have MDN pinned and I’m not even a software developer, just a mathematician who likes programming.
jve
> Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered?
Perhaps it just means technically inclined people are the first to see value and use in some product. Whether word of mouth spreads and people will find value in paying for search engine + goodies - time will tell.
LoganDark
Kagi's days are probably not numbered because of web devs (web devs are not going away any time soon, even with advancements in LLMs) but rather because of the indexes they use, or rather don't use.
Kagi is fairly good at ranking results and essentially making do with what they have, but in my experience it does not seem very good at all for searching for anything particularly obscure. It's like how DuckDuckGo uses Bing - nearly useless if you're not searching popular sites (like Wikipedia, MDN, etc.)
titaphraz
Pintrest owns all the top 7 blocked results. Good, they've earned it.
I never understood why Google let them destroy Google Image search results.
omoikane
Apparently Pinterest has half a billion users[1], presumably significant number of those appreciate those search results. I am also going to guess that there is little overlap between those 500M users with HN's 5M users[2] or Kagi's 43K users[3].
So while those results-gated-behind-logins might seem annoying to us, we are in the minority.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/463353/pinterest-global-...
eddythompson80
I remember a few years before Pinterest’s IPO, there were random statistics flowing around about how unique of a demographic Pinterest had compared to the rest of the internet. It’s mostly female dominated compared to the rest of the male dominated internet. Not just any female demographic either, but upper middle class, high income, young women †. There was simply no other online service that had that as its main demographic to the degree that Pinterest did. I remember thinking that must be a really attractive target for online advertisers and maybe I should keep an eye out for the IPO. Luckily I forgot. Its stock has been mostly lackluster.
†: hell son that was during my dating years. I was going on a lot of dates with women specifically in that demographic. Once I got to know a woman I would research her on google while narrowing my search to Pinterest. Out of 20 or so women I recall there were only 2 that didn’t have Pinterest accounts. The rest had, very active, Pinterest accounts.
randomNumber7
Interesting. I didn't even know pinterest is a legitimate site. I just assumed it is som SEO scam from looking at the website for a few seconds.
Ridir
It's a great tool for finding inspiration and creating moodboards.
Tangentally, IIRC the setting for the next Elder Scrolls game was all but confirmed after some creative at Bethesda accidentally made public a Pinterest collection with weapons and armor from the medieval arab world.
thih9
Try it, you may like it. I use it for collaborative visual brainstorming with real life projects (e.g. fashion or photo ideas) and it works well for that purpose.
qingcharles
It's actually a fantastic site. I use it for bookmarking images every day for future projects.
kjs3
Man I hate to say you're completely right, but you're completely right.
I remember years back being in some social thing where someone was railing on social media and pontificated "absolutely noone wants what Facebook is", and I grudgingly had to retort "you don't want Facebook, but a half a billion people (at the time) obviously do".
Read the room.
graemep
Many of us are reluctant users. There because our friends our communities are. I would love FB to go away.
I am the admin of two FB groups, both UK home education related (one about exams and qualifications, the other for single parents). I do it because I feel I should help the community (especially as the crappy commercial groups that target the same audience), which is made up of non-technically inclined, mostly middle aged women - i.e. FB's core demographic. I cannot remember the other demographic nos offhand, but its 95% women in the exams group, and 98% in the other (and both have 1% other/did not say), and the age profile reflects the fact that people have school age (or just over, in the 16 to 18 age group) children.
I had actually planned to try and push the community towards forums, but with the Online Safety Act in force that is not a risk I am inclined to take.
My cousin runs a family group where she shares photos and wishes people happy birthday. I would prefer her to use WhatsApp but she is the one running it.
A lot of my friends post family news, important things like births and deaths and weddings on FB.
harrall
I like Pinterest a lot.
I find art, tattoo ideas, home decor, concrete/wood builds, clothing fits, wedding themes…
It’s like a one-stop-shop when you need some fresh ideas on design.
djhn
It also has a ludicrously smooth and fast UX and makes it possible to access the high resolution original photographs (up to 100+ megapixels) by modifying url parameters.
waiwai933
I'm surprised - simply because I never get Pinterest results on Google. Now admittedly most of my searches aren't the kind where Pinterest is likely to have relevant results, but even then, surely I'd at least see them _sometimes_. But I literally can't remember the last time I saw a Pinterest search result.
Unless, as you suggest, they take over Google Images but not text search results? I could believe that I use Image search sufficiently rarely that I wouldn't have seen a Pinterest result.
danpalmer
I only get Pinterest results when I'm searching for something generic enough, and in those cases, why not use an image from Pinterest. I don't really understand the hate.
zonkerdonker
It's a nightmare for finding the original sources of images. For example, I was looking for a new sink basin and doing some quick image searches for various styles.
All the ones I liked were pinterest posts with zero attribution. A reverse image search then just brings up dozens of ripped and reposted copies of that pinterest post, also without attribution.
It gets frustrating
stevage
Pinterest is always a dead end for me. I don't have an account, so I can't actually access anything that the link is taking me to. It's a giant turd in my search results.
daveoc64
Mostly because if you try and visit the page that the image was supposedly on, it won't actually be there.
edoceo
The hate is because Pinterest is shallow but shows when folk are searching for depth. The engine can't tell and these results are tricksy and false.
DecentShoes
Because Pinterest doesn't let you see anything without making an account and logging in.
RajT88
All of those top domains (of which the majority are pinterest) have more than earned it.
qingcharles
I'm one of the minority that loves Pinterest. Happy to have them in my results, honestly. A lot of times they are the only remaining source for a specific image that has faded from the rest of the Internet.
Retr0id
When I've been reverse-image searching for obscure things, sometimes it's been the only result (despite not being the original source). I'd rather see pinterest than nothing - but I suppose you can fix that with downranking rather than banning them outright.
Compared to the AI slop flooding image search results, pinterest is increasingly looking "better than the alternatives".
neilv
I love that wiki.archlinux.org is a top-Pinned.
I'm firmly a Debian shop, but I find that the Arch Linux wiki often answers non-distro-specific questions that I have about how to do something on Debian.
(Especially since I'm usually using Xmonad without a lot of the "desktop environment" stuff.)
hx8
The Arch Linux Wiki has some awesome information, but it's a little too informal for it to be a go-to for me. It's information is incomplete, opinionated, and sometimes has a "works on my machine" sort of a vibe.
But sometimes it just has the answer you need in an easily digestible format. Top 10 source for me, but not a top 3.
-- Some nerd with almost two decades of distro-hopping experience.
neilv
Yeah, I don't expect comprehensive and definitive documentation from it, nor copy&paste answers.
But for getting pointed in the right direction about things that have been obscured by the desktop environments, and then left largely undocumented nowadays, the Arch Linux wiki usually points me in the right direction.
Much of it would be pretty confusing to someone who only wanted high-level documentation in terms of the Gnome Desktop or KDE Plasma, though.
saghm
> But for getting pointed in the right direction about things that have been obscured by the desktop environments, and then left largely undocumented nowadays, the Arch Linux wiki usually points me in the right direction.
Even as an Arch user, probably at least 80% of my usage of the Arch Wiki is just going through "Troubleshooting" list of previously seen issues and solutions for whatever thing I'm dealing with. I don't go in expecting that everything will work exactly the same for me, but over the years I've ended up with quite a few headaches solved by pasting the right line in the right conf from one of those sections.
hx8
Oh it's really cool that you've used the arch wiki in that way. I had already done Linux From Scatch before I ran across the Arch wiki, so I was already familiar with concepts like boot loaders, kernel modules, and daemons. I mostly used it to find some sane config file values.
eddythompson80
I often wish there was a date attached to the articles there. I get that a wiki format is ever evolving and as a result there isn’t necessarily a meaningful date that could be added. However, unlike an article about Jupiter, carbon fiber or WW2 on Wikipedia, the date for when a guide was written about Power Management on Linux is very relevant. I often find myself trying to sort of deduce that from the history page, then I fail then I have to go look up if that information is in fact the most recent.
ddtaylor
I agree and I have to tell newer users all the time the wiki is very valuable regardless of if you use arch or not btw
switch007
It's so good it's made me question if it would be easier just to switch to Arch (so all the help would be directly applicable)
Cyph0n
The Arch Linux wiki is an absolute goldmine.
I briefly used Manjaro, Debian and Ubuntu before that, and now am primarily a NixOS user, yet I still find myself coming back to the wiki.
Brajeshwar
Two different views for logged-in users and public. I realize that it has a different view from a different non-logged-in browser (or incognito).
I stopped wearing T-Shirt swags from companies quite a while back. Recently, I thought of promoting Kagi and wore the T-Shirt they sent at a few meet-ups, office spaces with lots of tech-people and no-one recognize it. A few of them thought, when we talked, if the logo is for a Golfing group/community!
Personally, I was thinking I’m proudly promoting something akin to ‘Wearing Google T-Shirt in 1999’ but this time, “Humanize the Web.”
mastercheif
Such a huge miss not including the name of the company on the shirts. It could be a fitness logo for all anyone knows.
edoceo
First rule of marking. Say your name, loud & proud! Bragging doesn't take care of itself. Gotta be like the Beastie Boys, say your name 3+ times in every song.
finnthehuman
Bleh, that attitude ruins merch. If all you care about is maximizing the number of walking billboards then you're satisfied because it's impossible to calculate the ROI of making available designs that people actually want to wear in public but reduces walking billboards.
The only tech merch I've ever worn was back when firefox had a good logo, goodwill, and no text on the front of the shirt.
Lots of people just want a simple graphic tee and IFKYK. It's not sports. Bands can sometimes get exceptions, but often approach wrestling tshirt levels of gaudiness.
mediumsmart
You’d be right if it wasn’t a search engine.
accelbred
At the airport, on the way to a Linux conference, I wore the Kagi shirt and people initiated conversations due to it.
lucgommans
I don't understand. Opening the page in a logged-out state, it looks the same to me (just that there are not buttons to pick whether you want to raise/lower/block a domain when you're logged out). What's the different view you mean?
0xTJ
I'm not surprised to see w3schools.com up there. I haven't come across it recently because of shifts in what I do, but it used to come up so often when I was looking for coding documentation. It was almost always useless.
lucgommans
If only it was merely useless. I know its reputation but it had some information that MDN did not have, so I used it this once in recent years. Turned out, the information was simply wrong and so I made a wrong decision based on that. (It might have been about favicon format support in different browsers. Presumably it was Safari that never had support for vector graphics whereas w3schools listed it as such, and it's not like you can just download Safari to double check.) Regardless, what I'm sure about is that I alerted them to whatever the problem was, but for me it was the last nail in that coffin
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stevage
Oh yeah, I always had that plugin that removed it from Google results. What trash.
MathMonkeyMan
It's better than it used to be, but I've long since had muscle memory for appending "mdn" to any webdevy or javascripty search.
I wish geeksforgeeks would die in a fire, no offense to its operators.
rcyeh
When I subscribed to Kagi, my block/lower/raise/pin lists were very highly correlated with these aggregate ones.
It makes me think that for Kagi customers, search engine rankings optimize for something other than useful sites such as docs.python.org and cppreference.com
Sabinus
Google Ad team can dictate to the Search team. We have the leaks. Google has sold out.
bcoates
Looks like alternativeto.net wins the most divisive prize, for being on the top boosted list but also heavily banned/demoted.
Runner up to the NYT
crooked-v
It's probably got to do with the bizarre design that hides the actual link to a productms website as a small element on the page and makes the most prominent links and buttons go to other things instead.
duskwuff
They're not very good at identifying what's actually an "alternative". By way of example, some of their top alternatives to OwnCloud include Dropbox, MEGA, and Google Drive. (All of which completely miss the point - OwnCloud isn't just a file storage service, and one of its key features is that it's self-hosted.)
lucgommans
I really like alternativeto. It's not always good: sometimes there are simply no good alternatives, or the community hasn't voted for the ones I'd have voted for and so a good option is way, way down. But if I want to know alternatives, I go there directly, so I guess that's maybe why people block it from appearing in random search results? I found it puzzling to see a useful site blocked (especially when I haven't seen it appear much in search results, but then, I've also been using DDG primarily, which ranks things rather differently)
Sxubas
Why is healthline so high on the block/lower list? (Excluding Pinterest)
IMO I like the fact that they link sources to their claims, which is very rare on the current web. I think of it as a somewhat trustable source of information. Am I wrong?
computer23
Healthline is not a trustworthy site- See Wikipedia discussion: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Reliable_sources/N...?
leereeves
I think it's reasonably trustworthy for a popular health site, but if I used Kagi I would block Healthline myself. Their Top N lists frequently appear on top of my health related searches when I'm looking for something more scholarly.
eclipticplane
I block them, but I block most common health sites. When I'm searching a health condition, I almost always only want Wikipedia. But Wikipedia's search is pretty bad unless you know the exact name of what you're searching for.
eddythompson80
Could be because healthline blocks most VPNs and manifest-based ad blockers. Kagi users are basically HN users.
Semaphor
I have it blocked because I had them show up with auto generated (and, obviously, wrong) AI slop results. Anything like that gets an instant block.
benterix
What I gather from this the single decision Google could make to improve Google Search is not to give Pinterest preferential treatment as most people hate it (not the site itself, it has its uses, but the way it's promoted in Google Image Search results).
claytonjy
Not the point of the post, but i’m surprised to see less than a million queries per day. Is that all of Kagi, or just some subset?
MostlyStable
They only have 43,000 members (stat from the same page), so that's 20 queries a day per member, which doesn't seem that crazy.
Brajeshwar
So, only us HN members are members of Kagi.
Semaphor
You are (maybe) joking, but I’d guess there’s an extremely high overlap between HN users and Kagi users. I converted someone from a metal discord I’m in to Kagi with a promo gift last year, and he’s also the only HN user on the server ;)
barryrandall
IIRC, nerds were the primary drivers of the search engine wars.
t-writescode
That said, 43k paying users is quite a bit of money, so if their team is small enough, that’s good enough, stable and steady income
MostlyStable
Yeah, my understanding is that they are trying (and I think I remember succeeding so far?) to be revenue positive/sustainable from the beginning, and not trying to rely on "grow and make money later" that other companies used.
Which I prefer; I got burned by Neeva shutting down shortly after they started (for a pretty mild version of the word "burned", it cost me very little, but it was annoying).
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kristianp
I feel like I haven't seen a pinterest link for ages, and I use google.
nxpnsv
This is convicing me to try Kagi for a while... search without pintrest would feel good.
What I gather from this is few if any non-software devs use Kagi
8 of the top 10 "raised" sites are software dev sites and with #6 being MDN I'm guessing it's not just any software devs, is web developers specifically that use Kagi.
Am I drawing the wrong conclusion? Does that mean Kagi's days are numbered? What would it take for them to get enough non-web-devs that the top 10 raised looked more representative of the average internet user?