This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?
I'm asking because that is what it looks like, but AI / LLMs are not specifically mentioned in this blog post, they just say news are 'generated' under the 'News in your language' heading, which seems to imply that is what they are doing.
I'm a little skeptical towards the approach, when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs, as far as I know there is no guarantee that those are correct – and it does seem like sometimes they just use pure LLM output, as no sources are cited, or it's quoted as 'common knowledge'.
Just for concrete confirmation that LLM(s) are being used, there's an open issue on the GitHub repository, on hallucinations with made up information, where a Kagi employee specifically mentions "an LLM hallucination problem":
There's also a line at the bottom of the about page at https://kite.kagi.com/about that says "Summaries may contain errors. Please verify important information."
FWIW, as someone who has chosen to pay for Kagi for three years now:
- I agreee fake news is a real problem
- I pay for Kagi because I get more much more precise results[1]
- They have a public feedback forum and I think every time I have pointed out a problem they have come back with an answer and most of the time also a fix
- When Kagi introduced AI summaries in search they made it opt in, and unlike every other AI summary provider I had seen at that point they have always pointed to the sources. The AI might still hallucinate[2] but if it does I am confident that if I pointed it out to them my bug report would be looked into and I would get a good answer and probably even a fix.
[1]: I hear others say they get more precise Google results, and if so, more power to them. I have used Google enthusiastically since 2005, as the only real option from 2012, as fallback for DDG since somewhere between 2012 and 2022 and basically only when I am on other peoples devices or to prove a point since I started using Kagi in 2022
[2]: haven't seen much of that, but that might be because of the kind of questions I ask and the fact that I mostly use ordinary search.
It is getting easier and easier to fake stuff and there are becoming less and less fully trusted institutions. So sadly I think you are right. Its scary but we are likely heading towards a future where you need to pay to get verified information and that itself will likely be segmented to different subscriptions for what information you want.
Well the thing is that technically information is free, but creating it is definitely not.
So, if Ads are not paying for it, and people won't pay for it either, who does?
Fake news exists because of the perverses incentives of the system; where getting as many clicks as possible is what matters. This is very much a result of social networks and view-based remuneration.
I don't think it's that bad if people need to pay for real information...
It seems a challenging situation.. if you pay fact checkers you get accused of censorship by “weaponised free speech” and if you leave it to the community you get inconsistent results.
The first one sounds like it's an argument made by someone who never wanted the facts to begin with. Correcting misinformation is not stifling free speech.
I'm all for more proper fact checkers, backed by reputable sources.
To take a moment to be a hopeless Stan for one of my all-time favorite companies: I don't think the summary above yours is fair, and I see why they don't center the summary part of it.
Unlike the disastrous Apple feature from earlier this year (which is still available, somehow!), this isn't trying to transform individual articles. Rather, it's focused on capturing broader trends and giving just enough info to decide whether to click into any of the source articles. That seems like a much smaller, more achievable scope than Apple's feature, and as always, open-source helps work like this a ton.
I, for one, like it! I'll try it out. Seems better than my current sources for a quick list of daily links, that's for sure (namely Reddit News, Apple News, Bluesky in general, and a few industry newsletters).
>giving just enough info to decide whether to click into any of the source articles.
If that info is hallucinated, then it's worse than useless. Click bait still attempts to represent the article, a hallucination isn't guaranteed to do thst.
Why not have someone properly vet out interesting and curious news and articles and provide traffic to their site? In this age of sincerity, proper citation is more vital than ever.
Yeah. I really like Kagi. This is a terrible idea.
1. It seems to omit key facts from most stories.
2. No economic value is returned to the sources doing the original reporting. This is not okay.
3. If your summary device makes a mistake, and it will, you are absolutely on the hook for libel.
There seem to be some misunderstandings about what news is and what’s makes it well-executed. It’s not the average, it’s the deepest and most accurate reporting. If anyone from the Kagi team wants to discuss, I’m a paying member and I know this field really, really well.
Thank you. Also a paying Kagi user because I like the idea that it’s worth it to pay for a good service. Ripping off journalists/newspapers content goes against that.
> It’s not the average, it’s the deepest and most accurate reporting.
Yes! I'm also a paying member but I'm deeply suspicious of this feature.
The website claims "we expose readers to the full spectrum of global perspectives", but not all perspectives are equal. It smacks of "all sides" framing which is just not what news ought to be about.
Yes, that's what it is. Kagi as a brand is LLM-optimist, so you may be fundamentally at odds with them here... If it lessens the issue for you, the sources of each item are cited properly in every example I tried, so maybe you could treat it as a fancy link aggregator
Kagi founder here. I am personally not an LLM-optimist. The thing is that I do not think LLMs will bring us to "Star Trek" level of useful computers (which I see humans eventually getting to) due to LLM's fundamentally broken auto-regressive nature. A different approach will be needed. Slight nuance but an important one.
Kagi as a brand is building tools in service of its users, no particular affinity towards any technologies.
You claimed reading LLM summaries will provide complete understanding. Optimistic would be a charitable description of this claim. And optimism is not limited to the most optimistic.
Another LLM-pragmatist here. I don't see why we should treat LLMs differently than any other tool in the box. Except maybe that it's currently the newest and most shiny, albeit still a bit clunky and overpriced.
Fwiw, I love your approach to AI. It's been very useful to me. Quick answers especially has been amazingly accurate and I've used it hundreds of times, if not thousands, and routinely check the links it gives
I'm about as AI-pessimist as it gets, but Kagi's use of LLMs is the most tasteful and practical I've seen. It's always completely opt-in (e.g. "append a ? to your search query if you want an AI summary", as opposed to Google's "append a swear word to your search query if you don't want one"), it's not pushy, and it's focused on summarizing and aggregating content rather than trying to make it up.
Google thinks the same of me and I don't even edit the URL. I can have a session working just fine one night and come back the next day, open a new tab to search for something, and get captcha'd to hell. I'm fairly sure they just mess with Firefox on purpose. I won't install Brave, Chrome, or Edge out of principle either. Safari works fine, but I don't like it.
Google has gotten amazingly hostile toward power users. I don't even try to use it anymore. It almost feels like they actively hate people that learned how to use their tools
I consider myself a major LLM optimist in many ways, but if I'm receiving a once per day curated news aggregation feed I feel I'd want a human eye. I guess an LLM in theory might have less of the biases found in humans, but you're trading one kind of bias for another.
This isn't really comparable. A newspaper is a single source. New York Times is a newspaper, CNN (a part of it) is a newspaper. Services like Kagi News, whether AI or human-curated, try to do aggregation and meta-analysis of many newspaper.
Yeah, I agree. The entire value/fact dichotomy that the announcement bases itself on is a pretty hot philosophical topic I lean against Kagi on. It's just impossible to summarize any text without imparting some sort of value judgement on it, therefore "biasing" the text
> It's just impossible to summarize any text without imparting some sort of value judgement on it, therefore "biasing" the text
Unfortunately, the above is nearly a cliché at this point. The phrase "value judgment" is insufficient because it occludes some important differences. To name just two that matter; there is a key difference between (1) a moral value judgment; (2) selection & summarization (often intended to improve information density for the intended audience).
For instance, imagine two non-partisan medical newsletters. Even if they have the same moral values (e.g. rooted in the Hippocratic Oath), they might have different assessments of what is more relevant for their audience. One could say both are "biased", but does doing so impart any functional information? I would rather say something like "Newsletter A is compromised of Editorial Board X with such-and-such a track record and is known for careful, long-form articles" or "Newsletter B is a one-person operation known for a prolific stream of hourly coverage." In this example, saying the newsletters differ in framing and intended audience is useful, but calling each "biased in different ways" is a throwaway comment (having low informational content in the Shannonian sense).
Personally, instead of saying "biased" I tend to ask questions like: (a) Who is their intended audience; (b) What attributes and qualities consistently shine through?; (c) How do they make money? (d) Is the publication/source transparent about their approach? (e) What is their track record about accuracy, separating commentary from factual claims, professional integrity, disclosure of conflicts of interest, level of intellectual honesty, epistemic standards, and corrections?
> The entire value/fact dichotomy that the announcement bases itself on
Hmmm. Here I will quote some representative sections from the announcement [1]:
>> News is broken. We all know it, but we’ve somehow accepted it as inevitable. The endless notifications. The clickbait headlines designed to trigger rather than inform, driven by relentless ad monetization. The exhausting cycle of checking multiple apps throughout the day, only to feel more anxious and less informed than when we started. This isn’t what news was supposed to be. We can do better, and create what news should have been all along: pure, essential information that respects your intelligence and time.
>> .. Kagi News operates on a simple principle: understanding the world requires hearing from the world. Every day, our system reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives. We then distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.
>> .. We strive for diversity and transparency of resources and welcome your contributions to widen perspectives. This multi-source approach helps reveal the full picture beyond any single viewpoint.
>> .. If you’re tired of news that makes you feel worse about the world while teaching you less about it, we invite you to try a different approach with Kagi News, so download it today ...
I don't see any evidence from these selections (nor the announcement as a whole) that their approach states, assumes, or requires a value/fact dichotomy. Additionally, I read various example articles to look for evidence that their information architecture group information along such a dichotomy.
Lastly, to be transparent, I'll state a claim that I find to be true: for many/most statements, it isn't that difficult nor contentious to separate out factual claims from value claims. We don't need to debate the exact percentages or get into the weeds on this unless you think it will be useful.
I will grant this -- which is a different point that what the commenter above made -- when reading various articles from a particular source, it can take effort and analysis to suss out the source's level of intellectual honesty, ulterior motives, and other questions I mention in my sibling comment.
Hard pass then. I’m a happy Kagi search subscriber, but I certainly don’t want more AI slop in my life.
I use RSS with newsboat and I get mainstream news by visiting individual sites (nytimes.com, etc.) and using the Newshound aggregator. Also, of course, HN with https://hn-ai.org/
You can also convert regular newspapers into RSS feeds! NYTimes and Seattle Times have official RSS feeds, and with some scripting you can also get their article contents.
> when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs, as far as I know there is no guarantee that those are correct
A lot of times when I ask for a source, I get broken links. I'm not sure if the links existed at one point, or if the LLM is just hallucinating where it thinks a link should exist. CDN libraries, for example. Or sources to specific laws.
I monitor 404 errors on my website. ChatGPT frequently sends traffic to pages that never existed. Sometimes the information they refer to has never existed on my website.
For example: "/glossary/love-parade" - There is no mention of this on my website. "/guides/blue-card-germany" has always been at "/guides/blue-card". I don't know what "/guides/cost-of-beer-distribution" even refers to.
They'll do pretty much everything you ask of them, so unless the text actually come from some source (via tool calls, injecting content into the context or other way), they'll make up a source rather than doing nothing, unless prompted otherwise.
On my llm, I have a prompt that condenses down to:
For every line of text output, give me a full MLA annotated source. If you cannot then say your source does not exist or you are generating information based on multiple sources then give me those sources. If you cannot do that, print that you need more information to respond properly.
Every new model I mess with needs a slightly different prompt due to safeguards or source protections. It is interesting when it lists a source that I physically own and their training data is deteriorated.
They could make up source, but ChatGPT is an actual app with complicated backend, not dumb pipe between textedit and GPU. Surely they could verify on server side every link they output to user before including it in the answer. I'm sure Codex will implement it in no time!
They surely can detect it, but what are they going to do after detecting it? Loop the last job with a different seed and hope that the model doesn't lie through its teeth? They won't be doing it because the model will gladly generate you a fake source on the next retry too.
Maybe they should be trained on the understanding that making up a source is not "doing what you ask of them" when you ask for a source. It's actually the exact opposite of the "doing what you asked, not what you wanted" trope-- it's providing something it thinks you want instead of providing what you asked for (or being honest/erroring out that it can't).
Think for a second about what that means... this is a very easy thing to do IFF we already had a general purpose intelligence.
How do you make an LLM understand that it must only give factual sources? Just some naive RL with positive reward on the correct sources and negative reward on incorrect sources is not enough -- there are obscenely many more hallucinated sources possible, and the set of correct sources is a set of insanely tiny measure.
"Easy". You make the model distinguish between information and references to information. Information may be fabricated (for example, a fictional book is mostly composed of lies) but references are assumed to be factual (a link does point to something and is related to something). Factual information is true only to the degree that it is conveyed exactly, so the model needs to be able to store and reproduce references verbatim.
Of course, "easy" is in quotes because none of this is easy. It's just easier than AGI.
If you need to ask for a source in the first place, chances are very high that the LLM's response is not based on summarizing existing sources but rather exclusively quoting from memory. That usually goes poorly, in my experience.
The loop "create a research plan, load a few promising search results into context, summarize them with the original question in mind" is vastly superior to "freely associate tokens based on the user's question, and only think about sources once they dig deeper".
It actually seems more like an aggregator (like ground.news) to me. And pretty much every single sentence cites the original article(s).
There are nice summaries within an article. I think what they mean is that they generate a meta-article after combining the rest of them. There's nothing novel here.
But the presentation of the meta-article and publishing once a day feel like great features.
I have yeah, to me it looks like what I described in my comment above, it's LLM generated text, is it not?
> And pretty much every single sentence cites the original article(s).
Yeah but again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think asking an LLM to provide a source / citation yields any guarantee that the text it generates alongside it is accurate.
I also see a lot of text without any citations at all, here are three sections (Historical background, Technical details and Scientific significance) that don't cite any sources: https://kite.kagi.com/s/5e6qq2
I can envision the day where an LLM article generator starts consuming LLM generated articles which were sourced from single articles (co-written by an LLM).
I guess I'm trying to understand your comment. Is there a distinction you're making between LLM summaries or LLM generated text, or are you stating that they aren't being transparent about the summaries being generated by LLMs (as opposed to what? human editors?).
Because at some point when I launched the app, it did say summaries might be inaccurate.
Looks like you found an example where it isn't properly citing the summaries. My guess is that they will tighten this up, because I looked mostly at the first and second page and most of those articles seemed to have citations in the summaries.
Like most people, I would want those everywhere to guard against potential hallucinations. No, the citations don't guarantee that there weren't any hallucinations, but if you read something that makes you go "huh" – the citations give you a low-friction opportunity to read more.
But another sibling commenter talked about the phys.org and google both pointing to the same thing. I agree, and this is exactly an issue I have with other aggregators like Ground.news.
They need to build some sort of graph that distills down duplicates. Like I don't need the article to say "30 sources" when 26 of them are just reprints of an AP/Reuters wire story. That shouldn't count as 30 sources.
> I guess I'm trying to understand your comment. Is there a distinction you're making between LLM summaries or LLM generated text, or are you stating that they aren't being transparent about the summaries being generated by LLMs (as opposed to what? human editors?).
The main point of my original comment was that I wanted to understand what this is, how it works and whether I can trust the information on there, because it wasn't completely clear to me.
I'm not super up to date with AI stuff, but my working knowledge is that I should never trust the output of an LLM and always verify it myself, so therefore I was wondering if this is just LLM output or if there is some human review process, or a mechanism related to the citation functions that makes it output of a different, more trusted category.
I did catch the message on the loading screen as well now, I do still think it could be a little more clear on the individual articles about it being LLM generated text, apart from that I think I understand somewhat better what it is now.
> No, the citations don't guarantee that there weren't any hallucinations, but if you read something that makes you go "huh" – the citations give you a low-friction opportunity to read more.
Either you mean every time you read something interesting (“huh”) you should check it. But in that case, why bother with reading the AI summary in the first place…
Or you mean that any time you read something that sounds wrong, you should check it. But in that case, everything false in the summaries that happens to sound true to you will be confirmed in your mind without you ever checking it.
...yes? If I go to a website called "_ News" (present company included), I expect to see either news stories aggregated by humans or news stories written and fact checked by humans. That's why newspapers have fact checking departments, but they're being replaced by something with almost none of the utility and its proponents are framing the benefits of the old system as impossible or impractical.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I wasn't challenging the concept of human editors and fact checkers. I was asking a parent for a clarification of what the parent post meant by outlining that they were LLM generated summaries.
Like, I was asking whether they were expecting the curation/summarization to be done by humans at Kagi News.
Publishing once a day to remove the "slot machine dopamine hit" is worth it for that alone. I have forever been looking for a peer/replacement to Google News, I was about to pony up for a Ground News subscription but I'll probably hold off for a couple more months. Alternatives to google news have been sorely lacking for over a decade, especially since google news got their mobile-first redesign which significantly and permanently weakened the product to meet some product manager's bonus-linked KPI. One more product to wean off the google mothership. Gmail is gonna be real hard though.
Gmail seems like the easiest piece of the Google puzzle to replace. Different calendar systems have different quirks around repeating events, you sometimes need to try a variety of search engines to find what you're looking for, Docs aren't bug-for-bug equivalent to the Office or iCloud competitors, YouTube has audience, monetization, and hosting scale... Gmail is just "make an email account with a different provider and switch all of your accounts to use the new address." They don't even give you that much storage for free Gmail; it's 15GB, which lots of other email providers can match (especially paid ones). You can import your old emails to your new provider or just store them offline with a variety of email clients.
Is updating all of your accounts (and telling your contacts about the new address) what you consider to be the hard part, or do you actually use any Gmail-specific features? Genuinely curious, as I tend to disregard almost all mail-provider-specific features that any of my mail providers try to get me excited about (Gmail occasionally adds some new trick, but Zoho Mail is especially bad about making me roll my eyes with their new feature notifications).
I am sticking with this reprehensible company for email because their spam detection is awesome and I have found no clear measurements of detection to reasonably compare. I’d love to be proven wrong!
Switched from Gmail to Fastmail about 10 years ago.
2-3 spam emails slip through every week, and sometimes a false positive happens when I sign up for something new. I don't see this as a huge problem, and I doubt Gmail is significantly better.
Gmail significantly improved the email spam situation for everyone by aggressively pushing email security standards like DMARC/DKIM/SPF [1]. This came at the cost of basically no longer being able to selfhost your own email server though.
I agree with the other commenter, I use Fastmail and I get very few spam emails, most of which wouldn't have been detected by gmail either because they're basically legitimate looking emails advertising scams. I have a Gmail account I don't use and it seems like it receives about the same amount of spam, if not more.
I don't understand how this once-per-day thing, very obviously a cost-cutting measure, can be taken seriously as a "feature". Stories evolve throughout the day. If this is truly important to you, just screen shot Google News, then look at the screen shot all day.
I am fine with it using AI but it makes me feel pretty icky that they didn’t mention that this was ai/llm generated at any point in this article. That’s a no-no IMO, and has turned me off this pretty strongly.
They don't explicitly say they generate summaries at any point in the article. In fact I read it and though this was just some fancy RSS aggregator. The way they describe the "daily briefing" is extremely ambiguous.
In this situation, humans are more accurate, for now, so it's good information to have.
Same as I would like to know if humans self assessed in a study about how well they drive vs the empirical evidence. Humans just aren't that good at that task so it would be good to know coming in.
Just call it Kagi Vibes instead of Kagi News as news has a higher bar (at least for me)
Kagi team member here who helped author that blog post announcement. That's a fair point, and we've updated the post to now clearly mention that we use AI for the daily briefing. Thank you for your feedback!
I'm firmly on the side of "AI" skepticism, but even I have to admit that this is a very good use of the tech. LLMs generally do a great job at summarizing text, which is essentially what this is. The sources could be statically defined in advance, given that they know where they pull the information from, so I don't think the LLM generates that content.
So if this automates the process of fetching the top news from a static list of news sites and summarizing the content in a specific structure, there's not much that can go wrong there. There's a very small chance that the LLM would hallucinate when asked to summarize a relatively short amount of text.
It's useful for the users, but tragically bad for anyone involved with journalism. Not that they're not used to getting fucked by search engines at this point, be it via AMP, instant answers, or AI overviews.
Not that the userbase of 50k is big enough to matter right now, but still...
What journalism? Most of these sites copy their content from each other or social media, and give it their own spin. Nowadays most of them use AI anyway.
Actual journalism doesn't rely on advertising, and is subscription based. Anyone interested in that is already subscribed to those sources, but that is not the audience this service is aiming for. Some people only want to spend a few minutes a day catching up with major events, and this service can do that for them. They're not the same people who would spend hours on news sites, so these sites are not missing any traffic.
Broadly agreed, I don't consider the CBS (national) news website to be a source of hard hitting journalism; Reuters, however, is. Reuters and the AP are often the source of these news stations.
I continue to subscribe to Reuters because of the quality of journalism and reporting. I have also started using Kagi News. They are not incompatible.
All this is doing is aggregating RSS feeds and linking to the original articles.
So this might result in lower traffic for "anyone involved in journalism" – but the constant doomscrolling is worse for society. So I think we can all agree that the industry needs to veer towards less quantity and more quality.
RSS feeds are meant to be used by actual users, not regurgitated publicly. RSS readers at the very least have have author info visible and its users tend to be reported to website's analytics with a special user agent.
I see! One thing I'm wondering: They say they are fetching the content from the RSS feeds of news outlets rather than scraping them, I haven't used RSS in a bit, but I recall most news outlets would usually not include the full article in their feed but just the headline or a small summary. I'd be worried that articles with misleading headlines (which are not uncommon) might cause this tool to generate incorrect news items, is that not a concern?
That's a fair concern, and I would prefer it if they scraped the sites instead. They could balance this out by favoring content from sites that do provide the entire article in their feeds, but that could lead to bias problems. Maybe this is why their own summaries are short. We can't know for sure unless they explain how it works.
If the parent commenter is correct, the concern I'd have would be about transparency. Even if it's good at what it does, I don't think we're anywhere close to a place as a society where it shouldn't be explicit when it's being used for something like this.
When you go to Google News, the way they group together stories is AI (pre-LLM technology). Kagi is merely taking it one step further.
I agree with your concern. I see this as a convenient grouping, and if any interests me I can skip reading the LLM summary and just click on the sources they provide (making it similar to Google News).
It cannot be "one step further", because there's a clear break in reality between what Google News provides and Kagi provides. Google News links to an article that exists in our world, 100%, no chance involved. Kagi uses an LLM generate text and thus is entirely up to chance.
> when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs,
Services listing sources, like Kagi news, perplexity and others don't do that. They start with known links and run LLMs on that content. They don't ask LLMs to come up with links based on the question.
That is what I mean yeah, I’m not saying it’s fabricating sources from training data, that would obviously be impossible for news articles, I’m saying if you give it a list of articles A, B and C including their content in the context and ask ‘what is the foo of bar?’ and it responds ‘the foo of bar is baz, source: article B paragraph 2’, that does not tell you whether the output is actually correct, or contained in the cited source at all, unless you manually verify it.
This seems like the opposite of "privacy by design"
> Privacy by design: Your reading habits belong to you. We don’t track, profile, or monetize your attention. You remain the customer and not the product.
How would the LLM provider get any information about your reading habits from the app? The LLM is used _before_ the news content is served to you, the reader.
It's also a workaround around copyright, news sites would be (rightfully) pissed if you publicly post their articles in full and would argue that you're stealing their viewership. But, if you're essentially doing an automatic mash-up of five stories on the same topic from different sources, all of a sudden you're not doing anything wrong!
As an example from one of their sources, you can only re-publish a certain amount of words from an article in The Guardian (100 commercially, 500 non-comercially) without paying them.
Yes, that is fine! That's how RSS feeds usually work when you follow more "mainstream" news sources. At the very least, you see the name of the author and you actually make a connection to their server that can be measured in the analytics.
But instead, Kagi "helpfully" regurgitates the whole story, visits the article once, delivers it to presumably thousands, and it can't even be bothered to display all of the sources it regurgitates unless you click to expand the dropdown. And even then the headline itself is one additional click away, and they straight up don't even display the name of the journalist in the pop-up, just the headline.
Incredibly shitty behaviour from them. And then they have the balls to start their about page with this:
And yet, after trying it, I have to admit it's more informative and less provocative than any other news source I've seen since at least 2005.
I don't know how they do it, and I'm not sure I care, the result is they've eliminated both clickbait and ragebait, and the news are indeed better off for it!
Soulless, uncreative, not fact-checked (or read by anyone before clicking publish), not contributing anything back to the original journalists, all of the editorial decisions are done by an undeterministic AI filter.
Not gonna call it the worst insult to journalism I've ever seen because I've seen factually(.)so which does essentially the same thing but calls it an "AI fact check", but it's not much better.
It's like instead of borrowing a book from the library, there's like a spokesperson at the entrance who you ask a question and then blindly believe whatever they say.
This is exactly how I want my news to be. Nothing worse than a headline about a new vaccine breakthrough, followed by a first paragraph that starts with "it was a cold November morning as I arrived in..."
I guess it's a matter of taste, but I prefer it short and to the point
Yes, they are not the only player here. Quite a few companies are doing this, if you use Perplexity, they also have a news tab with the exact feature set.
> if you use Perplexity, they also have a news tab with the exact feature set
"Exact" is far from accurate. I just did a side-by-side comparison. To name only two obvious differences:
A. At the top level, Perplexity has a "Discover" tab [1] -- not titled "News". That leads to a AAF page with the endless-scroll anti-pattern (see [2] [3] for other examples). Kagi News [4] presents a short list of ~7ish items without images.
B. At the detail-page level, Kagi organizes their content differently (with more detail, including "sources", "highlights", "perspectives", "historical background", and "quick questions"). Perplexity only has content with sources and "discover more". You can verify for yourself.
After using Perplexity, its news tab is US-centric, without much options to get regional content from what i can see.
Kagi seems to offer regional news and the sources appear to be from the respective area also. do appreciate public access (for now?) with RSS feeds (ironic but handy).
Thanks for pointing out that this is yet more AI slop. Very disappointing for Kagi to do this. I get my money's worth from searches, but if I was looking for more features I would want them to be not AI-based.
I guess they embed the news of the day and let it summarize it. You can add metadata to the training set, which you should technically query reliably. You don't have to let the model do the summarization of the source, which can be erroneous.
Far more interesting is how they aggregate the data. I thought many sources moved behind paywalls already.
> Kagi is probably the only pro-LLM company praised on HN.
Kagi made search useful again, and their genAI stuff can be easily ignored. Best of both worlds -- it remains useful for people like myself who don't want genAI involved, but there's genAI stuff for people who like that sort of thing.
That said, if their genAI stuff gets to be too hard to ignore, then I'd stop using or praising Kagi.
That this is about news also makes it less problematic for me. I just won't see it at all, since I don't go to Kagi for news in the first place.
I'm not against AI summaries if they are marked as so. Sneakily sliding LLM under the table is a dark pattern no matter how I interpret their intentions.
Even Google calls the overview box AI Overview (not saying it doesn't hurt content hosting sites.)
Disappointing. Non-LLM NLP summarization is actually rather good these days. It works by finding the key sentences in the text and extracting the relevant sections, no possibility for hallucination. No need to go full AI for this feature.
i believe an llm output is fine for giving an overview if provided the articles, if you want a detailed overview you should be reading the articles anyways.
> One daily update: We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual.
I might not agree with all decisions Kagi makes, but this is gold. Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you're a consumer not a customer.
> Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you're a consumer not a customer.
Someone recently highlighted the shift from social networks to social media in a way I'd never thought about:
>> The shift from social networks to social media was subtle, and insidious. Social networks, systems where you talk to your friends, are okay (probably). Social media, where you consume content selected by an algorithm, is not. (immibis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403867)
Specifically, in the same way that insufficient supply of mortgage securities (there's a finite number of mortgages) led to synthetic CDOs [0] in order to artificially boost supply of something there was a market for.
Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from strangers into your eyeballs) are the synthetic CDOs of content, with about the same underlying utility.
There is in fact a finite amount of individually useful content per unit of time.
> Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from strangers into your eyeballs) is the synthetic CDO of content, with about the same underlying utility.
This is a great way to put it. Much of the social media content is a derivative/synthetic representation of actual engagement. Content creators and influencers can make us "feel" like we have a connection to them (eg: "get ready with me!" type videos), but it's not the same as genuine connection or communication with people.
Parasocial relationships have always been a thing. People felt like they 'knew' celebrities and would commit weird acts of stalking or violence when that worldview was shattered.
but now it's ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE and almost completely socially acceptable. In fact, people look at you weird if you don't have a favorite youtuber or what-have-you.
It's not healthy. Not healthy one bit. Whereas it used to be for 'others' (meaning rich and famous people who lived lives we could never hope for), parasocial relationships tend to be focused on people who are 'just like us' now. There's probably something in there to be studied.
I agree but I also would like to see yesterday's news. 12 articles is a little to few for me. I would like to come back every couple of days and review what happened.
This is one of the big reasons I've gravitated towards a reverse-chronological feed that takes you from the past to the present -- at some point you hit a natural end, which is a natural prompt to go do something else. I've picked up Reeder[0] as a feed reader, since it can aggregate a bunch of sources (chiefly RSS, but also Mastodon, BlueSky, reddit, etc) and presents it in such a timeline without pressure to read everything.
I am seeing this app mentioned after years. When did this one move to subscription model - it was a one time paid app? Found it - it's also available as Reeder Classic on mac app store.
The one-time payment app and NetNewsWire (both excellent RSS readers themselves!) take a different approach than the subscription-only version of Reeder: they treat RSS more like email (with an emphasis on reading everything, or at least marking it as read).
About a year ago I switched my news reading habits.
Now I just read the news on a Sunday (unless I'm doing something much more exciting). For the remainder of the week I don't read the news at all. It's the way my grandad used to read the news when he was a farmer.
I've found it to be a convenient format. It let's you stay informed, while it gives enough of a gap for news stories to develop and mature (unless they happen the day before). There's less speculation and rumours, and more established details, and it has reduced my day-to-day stress.
Annoyingly I still hear news from people around me, but I try to tune it out in the moment. I can't believe I used to consume news differently and it baffles me why I hear of people reading/watching/listening to the news 10+ times per day, including first thing when they awaken and last thing before they sleep. Our brains were not designed for this sort of thing.
I am not so sure. It currently highlights a story from Munich, and in addition to a few factual errors, the information is simply outdated; there have been numerous new relevant developments. (I also don't understand the selection of sources. Aljazeera? rt.com? South China Morning Post? As if there weren't enough sources of original reporting right from Germany.)
I would agree that a single daily news update is useful (and healthy), but this must also be reflected in the choice of topics and the type of reporting.
I think this is the wrong direction. We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators.
Summaries are no substitute for real articles, even if they're generated by hand (and these apparently are not). Summaries are bound to strip the information of context, important details and analysis. There's also no accountability for the contents.
Sure, there are links to the actual articles, but let's not kid ourselves that most people are going to read them. Why would they need a summarizing service otherwise? Especially if there are 20 sources of varying quality.
There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed. I'll be harsh: this service strikes me as informationally illiterate person's idea of what getting informed is like.
Also, they talk about "echo chambers" and "full spectrum of global perspectives". Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory, but how far should it go?
Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context? Should an article about an airplane crossing the Pacific include "some experts believe that this is impossible because Earth is flat?"
Excessive bias in media is definitely a problem, but I don't think that completely unbiased media can exist while still being useful. In my expierence, people looking for it either haven't thought about it deeply enough, or they just want information that doesn't make their side look bad.
> Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory
A bigger bias problem by far is bias by omission, so including all stories whether they meet the presenter's political agenda or not would be a great start.
Just printing whatever lies a politician or CEO says without any context or pushback is not a useful “news” source. You could just follow them on social media if you are into that sort of thing.
Interviews have been a core part of serious journalism for much longer than you or me have been alive. If you want to be informed on a deeper level, you have to read or listen to interviews.
World leaders will always lie or side-step the truth in lesser or bigger degrees, because they represent a people or an organizations and committed fully to the interest of those. Part of being mature as a listener or reader is understanding that, and still get the useful information you need. Every person you meet in life will first and foremost speak from their own interest and agenda.
Then these interviews are complemented by regular reporting and interviews with people from the opposing viewpoint, if you so wish.
> We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators.
I agree, but how do you envision that happening? Journalism died a long time ago, arguably around the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, and it was further buried by social media. A niche tech company can only provide a better way to consume what's out there, not solve such large societal problems.
> There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed.
I don't think their intent is to change how people are informed. What this aims to do is replace endless doomscrolling on sites that are incentivized to rob us of our attention and data, with spending a few minutes a day to get a sense of general events around the world. If something piques your interest, you can visit the linked sources, or research the event elsewhere. But as a way of getting a quick general overview of what's going on, I think it's great.
We're seeing success with giving journalists better tools to create engaging journalism (which HN hates :). Many outlets are now seeing that they have to once more prove their value, and there exists some really great subscription-only media here in the Nordics and France.
That's precisely what Axios does, and they make money from this (and they don't list their sources). So I can see Kagi pursuing this.
FWIW, I agree with you.
I used to be a news junkie. I've always thought of writing the lessons I learned, but one of them was "If you're a casual news reader, you are likely more misinformed than the one who doesn't read any news." One either should abstain or go all in.
I guess I'd amend it to put people who only glance at headlines to be even more misinformed. It was not at all unusual for me to read articles where the content just plain disagreed with the headline!
It feels much less slimy to pay a nominal fee for a service than it does to use a "free" service and wonder about how / to what extent your data is being exploited.
100% agree. Free services have their place, but I'd love to have more paid service alternatives for derives that only exist as "free".
That said, all my friends think I'm insane and poke fun at me for paying for search, so I imagine we're a small minority.
People just hate paying for software in general in my experience, especially a subscription.
I have multiple good friends who refuse to pay 99 cents a month to get 50gb of iCloud storage so they can backup their phones, and instead of all their precious memories on a single device that is out and about.
It's pretty well established that people are just generally irrational about free things. Because of this, I think any business model involving giving something away for free, whether it's a loss leader or or ad supported or something else, is fundamentally anti-competetive. Cognitive biases place any competitor charging for the good/service at a disadvantage. If you're a non profit, go ahead and give things away. If you're a business, you should have to charge.
I think the whole "if it's free, you're the product" nugget of information has not been broadly understood by folks, or if it has, maybe folks don't care as much about their data.
I do live these days with the understanding that pretty much all of my personal info is out there one way or another, a social security number is about as private as a phone number these days.
Totally, I think there are lots of assumptions of its just the data they explicitly put into the system, eg: "likes", "comments", "photos", but not the darker side of correlating activity across sites, interests, building profiles of you, selling your history, etc.
The Kagi implementation can use Kagi search and can use advanced features of search like lenses. This isn't a unique feature but if you believe Kagi search is better than whoever Anthropic/OpenAI are using it's a nice plus.
Kagi's contracts with LLM providers are the ones businesses get with actual privacy protections which is also nice.
Actually, i get the news search with a quick answer and a link to the assistent and not a single LLM but practically all LLMs in one interface and can link and share the chats.
The Interface is nice, simple and Kagi is very up to date regarding new LLMs (it already contains Sonnet 4.5, for example).
It's just a nice interface for all LLMs which i often use on mobile or laptop for various work and also private tasks.
The last months have shown that there is no single LLM worth investing in (todays "top" LLM is tomorrows second-in-class).
You get multiple LLM in a single interface, with a single login and a single subscription to maintain, all your threads stored at the same place, the ability to switch between models in a thread, custom models...
KI multi-step asisstant. Being able to try out all the llms in one subscription. Search integration with Kagi which means AI can really search only pages I want. And my settings for search as well.
I used Kagi search for awhile but eventually switched back to google because Kagi location aware search sucks. It might be better nowadays. I’ve been living on their browser Orion for a few weeks now though and it’s great. It works about 90% of the time which is impressive for a browser that isn’t tested alongside the big 4
Clearly there is divergence. Examples that I run into on a daily basis:
My credit union login does an infinite redirect on login. Works fine on Chrome (and all other major browsers)
Perplexity on the mobile version web search entirely broken. Loops with some error and becomes unresponsive. Works fine on safari.
Many other random stuff breaks at least a few times per day usually from login redirects and authentication. Extensions like 1Password have autofill only working some of the time. The list goes on
Most of their failures are usually on their custom features instead of basic WebKit / Safari functionality, in my experience. As a basic browser it’s great, but I consistently have issues with 1Password logins, especially if passkeys are involved. That isn’t necessarily their fault but the end result of me being unable to use their browser is the same. And if I’m going to use a basic browser I might as well use Safari and not deal with any third party software.
What everyone gets wrong about news curation is thinking people want the same news as everyone else, or "both sides" of a situation, or whatever mechanism for exposing them to things that someone else thinks are true.
What I actually want is a curated set of things that are useful to me personally given my situation.
The most important things about my situation to give me useful news are things like: net worth, income, citizenship, family situation, where I live, what industries I work in, current investments, travel destinations, regulatory and political risks associated with any of those things, etc.
Because those are the things that dictate how the parts of the world I can't control are going to affect me (especially if I don't react).
I don't want to hear about random things that aren't going to affect me when I'm looking at the news.
Sometimes I want to learn new random/useless things for fun, but that's a leisure activity. It's totally separate from the "news", which is a thing that adults consume as a chore to better plan their lives.
The fundamental problem is that myself and others are not going to willing give out the personal information required to curate useful news feeds, so the news will always be filled with noise.
Maybe local AI can help with that.
ChatGPT Pulse has actually done a great job at this for me. It knows about an upcoming vacation I have planned and gave me some specific news about closures and events there, with recommendations on what activities to book in advance.
I like Kagi and want them to succeed. But currently (according to LinkedIn) theres 26 employees. They are building search, LLM assistant wrappers, a browser and now news. Please don't overextend the same way Proton is currently doing.
I used to love Proton, but they focus too much on feature development instead of stability and fixing long-standing bugs. E.g. zooming has been broken for years in ProtonMail on iOS. Some emails won’t even render at all :(
Yup, i quit Proton (Mail) for the same reason. I had been using it for a long time…
There are so many little bugs and annoyances, it’s frustrating to see new features being released all the time while obvious bugs and shortcomings are not fixed.
It was a very big relief going back to a normal email client.
I still support Proton (i pay for Proton VPN) and hope they will succeed in their mission.
How is Proton over extending? All of their services are pretty great imo. I'm happy with them. Doesn't mean I am ever going to use their bitcoin wallet app thing, but if they want to build it, great, they know their customer base so it's probably not out of left field.
In the drive mobile app you cant even download a folder. There has been issues opened on it for almost a year now and since then they've opened two entirely new services and added many extra features.
When you're paying for something you expect the basics to be there and thats what annoys me about proton.
A similar one for Kagi: All other popular search engines have an alternative URL that enforces safesearch, allowing IT admins/parents to prevent safesearch being turned off at a DNS level (e.g. forcesafesearch.google.com, strict.bing.com). Kagi's had an open request for one for 3½ years[1] and it was recently downgraded in status away from Planned.
I like this a lot, going to try it! One issue i have though is in the current world of LLMs scraping content, i'd prefer there to be more discussion about compensation of authors.
I know the announcement page talks about not scraping, but to me personally the value i see in this product is that i don't have to go to those ad ridden, poorly organized and often terrible pages of the authors. Which then seems really unfair to the actual content providers.
I'd like to see this type of service cost $3-5/m ontop of my normal Kagi sub to compensate the authors of the articles i read. A Streaming Music model for news, ish.
This proposed value is quite small, but my assumption is only a very small amount of money would reach them from my ad views anyway so a $10/m addition feels extreme to me.
> One daily update: We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual.
Could you guys maybe print it on paper and send it to my physical mailbox, so I can do this ritual with breakfast? :-)
Given that Orion (which I repeatedly attempt to daily drive due to the dearth of browsers meeting my requirements right now on macos) is still full of bugs that hamper usability, and seems to introduce new ones with every update, I don't know why Kagi insists on overextending itself like this. They just started porting their broken browser to Linux, they're creating a maps app, all while they clearly do not have the manpower to finish the projects they've already started.
- Site blocking with /etc/hosts doesn't work consistently with Orion, it intermittently and inconsistently ignores these rules. (this is sort of niche but it's bizarre for a browser based on WebKit)
- The password manager is busted on certain websites that have a third input box (so a captcha or 2FA code), where it'll fill the password twice
- Kept randomly getting the error "Orion can't open this page: This operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory" with like 10 windows, ~30 tabs open. Haven't seen it recently but like many Orion bugs it is intermittent and hard to reproduce consistently.
- Switching between Chrome and Orion sometimes (inconsistently) switches me to the last Orion window I had open (often on a different Desktop) rather than the one I clicked on.
- On networks where I can form WebRTC connections in Safari and Chrome, I cannot in Orion.
- This was just fixed but until like yesterday, the highlight color in their PDF viewer for ctrl F was a barely visible 10% opacity highlight that was totally unusable.
- Various other intangible performance bugs that seem to pile up when you haven't restarted in a day or two. It starts out really snappy and tends to get slower the longer you've had it open.
I should note that the pace of developement would be much faster if they would open source the browser, but instead of that they keep starting new, closed source projects that will likely have the same fate. Their Linux Orion port is from scratch, none of their macOS code is reusable.
> - Site blocking with /etc/hosts doesn't work consistently with Orion, it intermittently and inconsistently ignores these rules. (this is sort of niche but it's bizarre for a browser based on WebKit)
oh i hate it when developers get cute with DNS. this doesn't happen with Safari? i've also had issues with the password manager (even after telling it i want to use Passwords, it just... doesn't sometimes).
i've been in the same boat as you - i really want to diversify the browser ecosystem, so i've been daily driving orion for a bit, but their stance toward open source (which you mentioned) is a big bummer.
hmm last time i tried it, Safari blocked the sites correctly as did Chrome. just tried it again and Safari let me through, so maybe that one's not on Orion.
> This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?
This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't exist, Kagi wouldn't work.
This is true in a big picture sense but that's not the concern of someone who's making a tool meant to be useful to users. The consequences of this existing will be what they will be.
> This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't exist, Kagi wouldn't work.
Why would Kagi stop working if news didn't exist? Kagi is a search engine first and foremost, Kagi News is not a money making product of theirs. Kagi would still be making money with their search engine.
Also, this should entice news writers to write better news. The main reason people use products such as this is that they are sick and tired of going to news sites only to have to power through filler material to get the 10% that actually matters...
Big news junkie but I don't feel the need to buy into Kagi's ecosphere personally as a SearXNG user. The article touches on signal over noise and I have found two solutions that work for me as a news junkie:
News Minimalist [1] and Boring Report [2]. Both aggregate news and (IMO) most importantly provide links from multiple outlets for the same stories. Really made me notice the clickbait and allows me to be more selective in choosing reputable sources.
Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on importance, while the latter summarizes articles. (That doesn't feel useful for supporting journalism as a whole so I typically click through and read the articles unless I don't like the outlet reporting)
I've been using this since the beta launch, and I really like it. They're spot on about news being broken.
That said, I do think the service could be improved. Often the summary is a very short blurb that forces me to go to one of the original sites for the content, and hopefully land on one that is not obnoxious to use, which kind of defeats the purpose. The event timeline sounds interesting, but when it essentially shows 2 or 3 events that are obvious from the context, it's not so useful in practice. I always skip the "Quick questions" section, since it reads like an elementary school report, and the questions are really basic. How about letting me ask the questions I want?
Also:
> We don’t scrape content from websites. Instead, we use publicly available RSS feeds that publishers choose to provide.
I think this is a mistake. Most publishers are hostile to RSS and often don't offer it. Scraping is, unfortunately, a requirement if you want to consume public content on your own terms, which is the entire point of this service. Besides, scraping is how all search engines generate their index, so as long as the bot is well behaved and doesn't hammer the site, follows robots.txt or perhaps even bends the rules a bit, it should be fine. I would rather Kagi wasn't so respectful of publishers' wishes, if that would allow them to offer a better service. I understand if they want to avoid getting in trouble with publishers, but the alternative would be better for their users.
lol I added 'trump', 'republican', and 'democrat' as custom filter keywords and now it's showing zero stories in the USA category. So apparently, that category is a stand in for politics? Although I have the Thai category enabled (since I live there) and that's all run of the mill national (non political) news.
In other words, this is exposing a long standing flaw in journalism. I know things are super polarized now, but even 20 years ago, when mentioning a Congressperson regarding a particular social problem, they would specify if he was a Democrat/Republican.
I really don't need to know which party he is part of. If the article was about a party's stance, it makes sense - but the article is about one politician.
> I know things are super polarized now, but even 20 years ago, when mentioning a Congressperson regarding a particular social problem, they would specify if he was a Democrat/Republican.
When articles always mention party affiliation, people will judge the politician's behavior based on the affiliation, and not on his actions.
Several sections have Trump in the headline. I wish there was a way to block that word like I do in Lemmy. That guy monopolizes the headlines which only makes him more powerful, and annoys me. I'll see whether I can take this when I use this new app, which I otherwise think is great.
We have Content Filter on the web version. And it's coming to the mobile app very soon. We're working towards having complete feature parity with the web app.
I can't speak to any of the apps, but after making my original comment, I checked out the website version, and the settings there do indeed have filters for category as well as specific terms.
Surely it isn't that simple. Even a person who thoroughly condemns Trump's hijacking of media systems and attentions must acknowledge that if international politics are at all relevant for you, some actions of the US president should be seen by you, if only in exceptional circumstances.
This is the issue. I feel bombarded by trump's firehouse of bullshit, but some of it has to be important, right? So how can Kagi create a "smart" trump filter that focuses on the most important stuff and reduces the firehose. I tried Kagi news and created a "trump" filter and *every story in the US section was gone*.
The problem is the continual stream of bullshit emitted from Trump's mouth gets clicks, and as such even little things that don't have any bearing on an international audience are reported heavily.
When Biden was president I barely heard anything about US politics, but with Trump in power it's hard to avoid.
Haters gonna hate, but I just downloaded Kagi News and LOVE it.
I want to QUICKLY see all the news headlines and drill deeper in as needed, and Kagi News seems to do exactly this.
I never found the lowest most common denominator news "curation" to be at all interesting, let alone algorithmically driven ones. The issue with news has nothing to do with curation of mainstream media. There is very little value in reading a state department or law enforcement press release summarized by some overworked stenographer/journalist. Or some NGO's push to drive some nondescript narrative uncritically parroted. Or some SEO driven click bait or tragedy porn.
If you wanted to fix the news you'd begin by critically curating mainstream news and throwing 80% of it in the trash, then you'd add 80% of material and critical analysis back to the 20% that had none of that.
I do wish I could have better control of what languages I'm getting. Right now the option is to either translate everything or nothing. I'd prefer news in their original, untranslated form if it's one of the 4 languages I speak, otherwise translate them to English.
I added the category "Israel" and everything was in Hebrew, so I had to set my language to English, but now news in my native Swedish are translated to English and I have to kind of translate it back in my head as I read them.
It's not the end of the world, but it seems like fairly low-hanging fruit!
There are different settings for interface language and story language. Might it be that your story language is "default" (this appears to mean untranslated) and your interface language is set to English?
Do the checkmarks do anything? I expected them to disappear after a reload (like hiding a post on Hacker News), but apparently that's not what they're for.
"Mark as read" checks all the checkmarks, but since they're still there after a reload, I don't see the point.
The really weird thing to me is that the check marks don't persist across categories. I.e. I marked the story about Youtube as "read" in the "World" tab, but it doesn't get a check in the "USA" tab. Seems like the feature is pretty half baked.
It automatically marks stuff you've seen - it's just a visual cue. Similar to how search engines (like Google) show visited links with a different color.
I think keeping them on the page instead of automatically hiding them makes more sense for a product that's trying to update their news feed once per day. You feel more in control, as if it's not a stream of never-ending stories, but rather a fixed amount of stories that you can realistically power through. Seeing all items checked sort-of supports this philosophy.
Pretty nice so far. I enjoy the very visible categories (as in the "astronomy" label in the Science category, not the science, technology, etc ones) that make it easy to see if an article is relevant to my interests at a glance.
A save feature to keep track of interesting articles would be nice.
Having more news (or more filtered for quality) would also be nice. Right now at 12 the lists seem to be mostly taken up by trendy low-quality news that will be irrelevant and less news that doesn't make waves but will probably have more impact in the long run. Actually this might just be a lack of the number of places being scraped.
Not an actual example from the site but consider how much an article of someone saying the latest comet is actually alien technology trends (but is completely irrelevant) vs a scientific paper reporting on the measurements of the atmospheric composition of a bunch of exoplanets.
Not the news I need. I need local news. I care about my local mayer race. I care what my school board does. I care about the local art studio events. unless you are my neighbor you don't care about my community (you have your own).
If you live in big city beware that your newspaper probably is lacking your neighborhood coverage which is what you need.
You miss the real problem: what I need doesn't exist. My local big city newspaper doesn't normally send reporters to the local things I care about. They paste the meeting minutes of the city consul meeting, but those are "debated a proposal from some business, voted, then passed" - what was the proposals, what points were debated, who votes which way (if they can tell). I need this information because in a month there is an election and I want to know who to vote for/against, but without going to the meetings I don't know who is worth voting for. (these meetings are the same night as the school board, and other city meetings so it isn't even possible for me to attend them all even if I didn't have other things I also need/want to do in life)
I don't think they can. What we need are boots on the ground in each community. That means money to pay a lot of reporters. Which isn't compatible with a "Free (gratis) news" world. Even with ad supported news it is hard to get enough money to pay the people needed. And then we have to ask about bias - I wouldn't support a lot of reporters because they misrepresent my views politically in various ways.
Kagi, I'm willing to pay if you hire people to fact check the generated articles. Or maybe have the community fact check and visually distinguish checked sentences from unchecked sentences.
This is awesome. Only thing that is missing is a place for me to ask a question from Kagi Assistant about the current story I am looking at, using the story as part of the context of my question.
Nice to see an approach to reduce doomscrolling (for myself, and most of my bubble, the biggest addiction, impacting productivity, mental health, and neck).
Yet, there is Hacker Newsletter (https://hackernewsletter.com/, which I like and use), there are others pointed by GPT5 that I don't Mailbrew and Digest. Kagi looks like the true former.
What I do want is personalization - not by picking interest, but actual personality, prompt, tastes, good enough that it puts something other, rather than only narrowing and narrowing my view. Yet high quality, rather than clickbaits and other "fluff". Otherwise, following a few Reddits would do the job (with some API to send emails).
What I would like even more is something that actually turns my social media into daily emails.
There is almost no good reason to keep up with current events in a "news feed" style. I'd maybe like a feed that has a 1 month window summarizing any news cycle that survived 3 days. If it came and went in one cycle, then just don't bother about it. Most of the news is just propaganda anyway. I suppose it's wise to have a sense of the "current thing" so you don't put your foot in it with colleagues who are inhabiting a tighter timeline than you are, but other than that there doesn't seem to be many use cases for keeping tabs in a news feed. Maybe if you're in the business of disrupting/reinforcing people's OODA loops you might need to know some of this stuff, but otherwise it's just a self-own to keep up with the news.
We've Time Travel feature coming soon to both the web and mobile apps. It'll allow you to browse the stories from any date since we started aggregating news ;)
That's a good idea. If they implement it, I would however suggest putting a limit on to it - perhaps only let you see the news within the last week/month.
There is also a list of "citations" which are referenced from the generated text, and "sources" which are not referenced anywhere. It's not clear if they used reddit or reuters to generate any of the text.
I also see lots of citations to "common knowledge"... which is um, weird.
For example:
> National Guard activation: Guard forces can serve under state control (Title 32) or be federalized (Title 10), which determines who directs missions and the scope of authority [*].
Hey - Reddit is included as a source because posts can contain firsthand accounts and independent analysis. The RSS feed we use from Reddit provides the post title and text. So to answer your question, when you see Reddit as a source we are using the aforementioned data, not what it links to.
About "common knowledge" sources - we validate all content for accuracy. When the LLM needs to add context that's missing from sources (e.g. historical background), we mark these as "common knowledge" since this generated content can't be validated against the original sources. You're right that your example isn't common knowledge at all, we'll work on adding actual sources for these claims too.
Every single news aggregation services promises the same "signal over noise" and "just the facts". I'm so numb from hearing that, that I don't believe it anymore.
I do however like the fact that Kagi only pushes _once_ a day. Drinking from the firehose is physically and mentally exhausting. Even daily feels like too much these days other than a quick check to make sure the world didn't implode or the Rapture happened while I was busy trying to get CC to behave.
Very skeptical that this would work for me. None of the topics that Kagi chooses to "cover" in their seven or so stories for the day resonates with what I'd want to read. That's exactly why we have feeds that you can tune to your tastes and so on. Getting rid of endless scrolling and such might be a good thing though.
It's not their lane. There are other solutions that exist which are fine. Maybe I was too quick to judge, I don't know. Maybe I'll be surprised in a good way.
Can anyone in here explain why there are so many vague "I don't trust Kagi" comments in here? I don't know who they are. And, I haven't seen anyone expand on why.
Kagi solves web search for now. LLMs are incapable of determining what’s important. They are excellent at determining what’s common. That doesn’t connect with news summarization in the way we’d ideally want it to unfortunately. I don’t care for low fidelity news.
Thanks for providing RSS feeds for Kagi -- just added them all to https://usedigest.com so users can use this as a drop-in replacement for their news instead of adding various RSS feeds from other news outlets.
Between this app (kagi) and the Harmony hacknernews client, I'm super happy if this is my only content consumption on the internet/smartphone. The kagi app just needs a black/oled theme please, and can we bump the aricles from 12 to 20 or 30? 12 is just a tiny bit shy.
One of the best news sites (still running) that I use frequently is http://68k.news/ - it's sort of like this minus the AI summary and info part of the article.
It's just plain text web 1.0 page that uses some ranking algo to figure out the top stores of a given day across categories, and shows that headline and under it similar headlines across different news sources.
It used to pull in RSS from the sources so you could also read the articles in plaintext, but that broke a bit ago and the dev hasn't fixed it.
Regardless, I still find it a great site to quickly get up to speed on top stories of the day!
But also I really like (and pay for!) Kagi so happily support their own effort here.
As a paying customer of Kagi (family account), I'm delighted to see them spend my money in a way that seems utterly compatible with their history of making the web pleasant to use again.
Feedback (if someone reads it): offer an option to translate everything to English. For example, news from/about Russia are in Russian, and thus I can't meaningfully share them to non-Russians.
Hey, thanks patrakov for trying the app! Users can actually change the content language of the app from Settings. All stories will be automatically translated to their preferred language.
When you share a Russian story with a non-russian speaker, they will still be able to read the story in their own set Content Language in the Settings. We're working on improving the UX of language, sharing a story, and more.
I think other people mentioned it already, but ideally I'd like to choose a list of languages to leave them as is, and translate the rest.
For example, I can speak Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and English. Ideally I would want news in those languages to keep their original text, while translating news in other languages to a target language.
For example, if I set my language as English, Russian news would get translated to English, but Portuguese ones would keep their original text.
I really like this, and I say this as an AI skeptic. It's a good summary of news and looks quite neutral -- good enough for me to skim the headlines and then dig deeper if I need to.
Some UX friction i noticed:
To get back to the homepage from an article, i have to click on the article headline. While this is elegant and you likely get used to it, once you know it, it's not exactly intuitive.
I AM using it for a long time, its brilliant but as any ai can hallucinate. Joining 4 separate technical topics about 4 different companies and initiatives is funny but misleading. Wont go back though - HN+Kite is all I do.
Funny coincidence. This morning, my news aggregator delivered its daily results. The stack:
Miniflux (https://miniflux.app/) in Docker, fetching 75 RSS feeds I've collected over the years
~200 lines in a Jupyter notebook:
- Fetch entries from Miniflux API (last 24-48 hours)
- Convert to CSV, feed to LLM. GPT-5 identifies trending stories across sources
- Each article gets web-fetched and summarized via Gemini-2.5-flash
- Results render via IPython.display
Ten minutes per day, fully informed.
I prefer to not.
LLM prompts and feeds selection clearly expose my political preferences, interests, and location.
And this is research project for more serious task. For 200 lines of code, there are 1000+ for evaluation, automatic prompt optimization.
But idea is simple, so there should be no problem to implement it
When they started developing this they were looking for a Flutter developer. Here is my code challenge submission, in case any one is curious about what it would look like as a Flutter project: https://github.com/SpeerJ/Kite-Code-Challenge-for-Kagi
I had a little trouble imagining myself using this in particular but I'm a big fan of the search engine.
Mini feedback - it appears to report google news results as if from google and not the website in question (Wired in my case, the snapdragon x2 elite article).
Apart from that, it's really nice! Good job, kagi team!
Nice idea, I’ve been toying around the idea of consuming news only once per day. But for me I think I want an actual newspaper with in depth articles rather than short news posts from online news.
I think a fundamental issue with news is that it doesn't try to push people to have a more correct mental model of the world.
Some things that could change that:
- Deep fact checking. Community Notes on twitter do a better job at this than any other system I've seen. The reason it doesn't really work in practice is that the stream of misinformation and confusion is orders of magnitude larger than the Community Notes community. A news app should not have that scalability issue.
- Follow up. If I read something that later turns out to be false I need to be notified of that. This unfortunately requires that the app track what I have read.
- Context. If you have a news article about a stabbing, it sounds like stabbings are up. The context that they are going up or down statistically is extremely relevant. The lack of context can turn a tiny truth into a bigger lie.
- Deep confusion analysis. Figuring out where people are confused statistically and focusing on trying to manage that misinformation gap is not something that is dealt with at all. I would like to become LESS confused by information sources not more.
That's just media literacy I think. I would add to that "Sourcing": if the article just parrots some press release or badly summarizes some paper, it should at least link to that but they rarely do. Then it is hard to find the primary source, because you'll only find articles about it, not the actual primary source that they bury in google search.
The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Systems can change. Human brains on a population/genetic level can't. Blaming individual humans when we know statistically what they will do is mathematically equivalent to giving up.
Also, giving someone information that turns out to be false and never following up isn't "media literacy". I can't see how it can possibly be.
Absolutely, this is just what came to my mind when reading your suggestions. I meant media literacy teaches a lot of methodology that would naturally lead to your suggestions, that's all.
> Systems can change. Human brains on a population/genetic level can't.
Realistically we can't fix media literacy education and we can't fix journalism, both are systemically broken. But I would never blame people, everyone is the product of their environment and a victim of the system.
> Also, giving someone information that turns out to be false and never following up isn't "media literacy". I can't see how it can possibly be.
Media literacy in that context would just refer to reliable sourcing, reliable sources post retractions/corrections.
> Realistically we can't fix media literacy education and we can't fix journalism, both are systemically broken. But I would never blame people, everyone is the product of their environment and a victim of the system.
I think it's a lot more reasonable to expect change journalism. Or maybe not journalism per se, but information dissemination/world model updates. News/journalism is just the form we've sort of settled on for that kind of job, but it's fundamentally the wrong thing. It's like asking for a faster horse when we want a car. Or asking for email notifications when we really want is a way to know the current status of something.
> Media literacy in that context would just refer to reliable sourcing, reliable sources post retractions/corrections.
I think the reach of those corrections is as much a problem as if they are published. Posting retractions to a printer that is directly hooked up to a shredder is technically "posting retractions", but practically it's not. Same as most news sources really. The retractions are functionally buried for almost all sources, including the most prestigious source Nature.
> Or maybe not journalism per se, but information dissemination/world model updates. News/journalism is just the form we've sort of settled on for that kind of job, but it's fundamentally the wrong thing.
There is no particular reason to assume journalism has a future at all, why rely on a journalists biased summary of a press release and biased editorial teams prioritization of what's important. It increasingly discredits itself, with smaller concentrated ownership and blatant biased reporting (see Iraq war, Gaza genocide). Then the centralization makes it vulnerable to external malicious attacks (see Gawker). But there are so many parts that are hard to replace, credible reporting on current events and investigative journalism, that requires resources mostly only present in large organizations like the visual investigations team at the nyt. It's broken but hard to replace, especially making it decentralized.
In France (and maybe other countries) this is kind of what Courrier International [0] does but with humans curating and translating articles from around the world, and human-written summaries articles from multiple sources. It's in the same holding as Le Monde.
Just plugging my service, https://mosaique.info/. It only uses an LLM to generate a short summary, and other ML algorithms structure the information (comments from officials and experts, classification...).
I'm currently working on a major overhaul to provide more holistic context around news by better surfacing less-discussed events.
I’ve been using this for a few days now. I stumbled across it in the App Store last week.
I hoping this can fill a gap for me currently. I want something that will give me broad awareness of big news I should probably know about, that’s not a 24 hour firehose of news.
I like the once-per-day update and the relatively short list of stories. The jury is still out on how sticky it will be, in terms of being my go-to place for a daily update.
One thing I found working on a startup which touched on the political sphere is people don't want curated lists imposed on them, they want to impose their curated lists on other people.
I like that it only provides the list once a day (I do think that's a clever feature), but the inability to influence bias seems like a mistake, especially since the sources already seem to follow a bias.
"Community-driven sources: Our news sources are open source and community-curated through our public GitHub repository. Anyone can propose additions, flag problems, or suggest improvements."
This sounds like it's going to be a massive headache. Activists with nothing to do all day will be all over this, for their chance to try to have influence over what other people read.
Is not the purpose of Kagi that it isn't like Google/Bing excessively buying into LLM hype? I just want an independent sustainable search engine, that's all.
I really like the balance here. No "brand names" in the headline summaries, no imagery or videos on the homepage, summarize multiple sources. It's daily so no need to refresh.
I've been really enjoying Semafor's emails too, but their 2x a day is tough for me to keep up with. I'll try to get a habit of looking at Kagi News to stay informed.
I like 1440 (https://join1440.com) for this. Once a day daily email digest. I like the email format because I'm less likely to start clicking around compared to a web site, and it doesn't require a separate app.
I think it is human curated, but I'm not positive about that.
I love everything that Kagi has put out. The Orion browser rocks (recently replaced Brave, good riddance) and my go-to chatbot today is the Kagi Assistant with Kimi K2 connected to the internet.
I tended towards Axios but lately it's gotten a bit paywalled and less informative. Can't wait to incorporate Kagi News into my daily workflow.
I've been using Kagi for 2 months and has some very positive experiences with it. Nowadays I don't use search heavily but it's still nice to have alternatives like Kagi search.
The news feature feels a bit underwhelming and underdeveloped though, especially with the LLM/AI approach.
I’m probably online too much, but a lot of the news I see is from yesterday. Supposedly it just refreshed with today’s news, but does that really clear out anything older if some outlets publish their stories later than others? I would not describe some of this as "today's headlines"
I've been using Kagi search for a while now and frankly it's fantastic. Google looks like AOL to me now.
These guys are doing great work and this news product is exactly what I want... Once a day hit. What is happening in the world? As far as pmf goes they hit the mark for an old fart like me.
Given that this news is generated I have no idea why the default would be to be in the native language of the sources. And if that makes any sense I would need to be able to select multiple languages I want to read in because I can’t read all languages.
Kagi, please, please, please don't fall into the Mozilla trap and waste your time creating a whole bunch of useless side projects that never succeed, to the detriment of the one thing that we all need you to do.
You have a great search service. Please focus on that. Build that into an actual Google-beater. Provide the features your customers actually want. Spend your time, money, and energy making that the greatest search service possible.
Unlike Mozilla's browser, I'd like to believe that our search engine is getting better with each update?
Mozilla fell into this trap as its business model was fundamentally broken (majority revenue coming from biggest compatitor). Our business model is healthy and the more apps we have in the ecosystem the stronger the ecosystem gets.
> the more apps we have in the ecosystem the stronger the ecosystem gets
that only works if the apps somehow reinforce each other, and spending time developing one app also adds something to the other apps. I'm not sure that's true here. I don't see how an LLM-based news service makes your search service stronger?
They do - Kagi News, Summarize and Translate all contribute back to the ecosystem and are getting integrated cross-product. We are in the business of information consumption and consuming news is one of the fundemental use cases. Having our own pipleine for this is beneficial long term.
I really like this for practising a foreign language by switching the content language. I do agree with other comments here though that it will need greater control over which languages are translated.
i'm doing something like this, summarizing HN posts because most of the time when there's hundreds or thousands of comments, it's not possible to read everything and i feel like i'm missing something.
So far, i quite enjoy having a summary with bullet points.
It actually seems nice. I realize Reddit is not a news source but it used to be a great way to see current events and get level-headed takes on those events. This approach could be a better non-biased* alternative.
I don't understand how this is 100% free, no subscriptions, no purchase, apparently no ads or tracking and yet I'm also the "customer" and not the product. What's the catch?
It seems fairly low effort (from a cost perspective) to deploy and maintain this feature, so I think it's a great way to get the Kagi name out there, which may perhaps lead to a few new users!
Sort of like a loss leader, eg the Costco hot dog :-)
There is a more fundamental problem here. The news feeds are going in this direction for a reason. I don't think you addressed that reason.
You have defined the desirable news as "pure, essential information". What's that again? How do you know what's pure and essential info for any user? The traditional news media had started there, with that pure news, and ended up here where they are today.
Ultimately, you will realize that your content need to grab attention enough so that people consume your feed. People's attention goes to where things look weird, exciting, sensational, emotional, trivia, gossip etc. You can't do away with all that and just dish out the pure and essential info. It didn't work. People tried it.
After poking around for half an hour or so, I think I'm going back to ground news :) . I love most kagi products but this one is going to need some more love I think.
After each headline on the page with all the tabs, there is an unlabeled button after each headline. Please, Kagi I beg of you, don't overextend yourselves.
As a Kagi Ultimate subscriber with a Family Plan and a separate subscription for Orion+, I've got to say, I don't see the point of this.
RSS works great and there are a million ways to consume them. There are also a myriad New aggregator offerings, most with some sort of LLM thrown in on top.
Did we really need this? Was there nothing better Kagi could dedicate its resources to?
Thank you for your support. What I will say will sound a bit selfish - but I needed this and it happened. More details in my relationship with news in the first two articles linked at https://kite.kagi.com/about
To be fair this is exactly how Kagi Search happened too - many people didn't see a point in a paid search engine in 2018 too, but I and my family needed one and it happened.
really nice, I was looking for something like this yesterday and now I see this. It would be nice to see these aggregators try to format these stories like a newspaper though instead of just a list of rss feeds under different categories. if it's already curated you may as well make it pretty too and make me feel smart as if im reading an actual newspaper
As much as i hate modern news sites and our ad riddled culture, its pretty hard to ignore that this tool couldn't exist without the articles that those same news sites are creating.
100 years ago, imagine a service that just took all newspapers and summarized them like this somehow, and everyone knew they had no actual writers but just an advanced printer that could merge articles or some goofy w/e.
can't imagine it would go over well in the court system.
Nextcloud News works just fine, is free, is as biased as the feeds you configure and no more, does not (yet...) introduce/intrude LLM slop, is free software (beer/freedom) and has been around for a long long time. You can configure it any way you want, the default update interval is 5 minutes which should be enough for even the most FOMO-affected 'news' junkie. Of course the actual updates depend on the RSS sources but if you configure a number of active feeds you'll get updates every few minutes.
Cool idea. I just installed the app and it seems quite well-engineered! However, here are a few things I'd love to see improved:
- Allow me to have a single feed (as opposed to one tab/feed per category). Also, to prevent that feed from becoming too long, allow me to set a maximum number of news items or maximum number of minutes I'd like to spend. Prioritize/leave out news items accordingly. In other words: While I might be interested in sports, I'm not interested in reading or scrolling through as many news items about sports as about, say, world politics.
- "Highlights" and "perspectives" below the article text read like useless AI slop that merely reiterates the text, and artificially prolong an otherwise neatly concise page.
- Allow me to intersect categories and/or choose a regional "focus". Non-regional categories like "sports", "business", "technology" currently seem to aggregate news from across the world. However, I might be particularly¹ interested in a regional subset of e.g. business or sports news.
¹) I.e. not exclusively so. I'm still interested in world news but only when it comes to major events (in the sports case, say, world cups and championships).
I find Kagi somewhat perplexing with this release. On one hand, the search engine is clearly good at surfacing content that isn't AI slop, and it has initiatives like the "small web" that endeavor to surface smaller websites. Instead of doing something similar, it's just an AI summary engine. I find it not only contradictory of many of their other efforts, but also unasked for. I would love to see something similar to "small web" for news.
I'm biased because I build my own RSS reader[0] and I feel that with this approach the thing I love the most about RSS, to follow small niche sources gets lost. That said, I think for big news it could be great.
I don't find it too much. For $10 I get a search engine better than all the others, I get access to many AI models via Kagi Assistant and Kagi Translate.
While I understand different people find value in different things, dismissing Kagi generally as "too expensive" is ignorant IMO.
I think it also depends what you use it for. I use both their search and their AI models for software development and it saves me precious time when looking for information - in a way it pays for itself.
I get by with the $5 plan. I don't use it at work, and it shows. I often curse during work that I can't exclude certain domains permanently from my Google search!
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".[1]
Cool but how does it compare to something like subreddits? There are still biased moderators behind the scene just like subreddits. Seems to not have the upvoting/downvoting side of it which imo is crucial to democratize the entire thing.
I think upvoting/downvoting is a crucial aspect to news/information/knowledge. But we've been doing it with just numbers all along. Why not experiment with weights or more complex voting methods? Ex: my reputation is divided in categories - I'm more an expert in history then politics hence my vote towards historical subjects have more weights. Feels like that's the next big step for news. Instead of just another centralized aggregator?
I LOVE this. The app feels very clean, the data's presented beautifully, and it hasn't been enshittified yet. And hopefully never will, because I pay Kagi in hopes that they don't.
I feel this is what Apple News should've been. Instead it's just god-awful ad-filled mess of news articles. And the only reason I have it is because of Apple One. But it is a clearly neglected product.
I also pay for ground news but it hasn't met my expectations, mostly because there's a lot of redundancy with wire stories. Like it'll show 50 sources but they're all just regurgitating the same AP or Reuters article. So it skews the "bias"
What is the business model / exit strategy for Kagi's founders and investors? What is the news curation process and its relation to the public interest?
Are these articulated in a manner which gives stakeholders (investors, users, and staff) assurances and standing?
...
What are competitors and collaborators in this space? Semafor seems to have a similar product, what are the differentiators and/or collaboration opportunities?
...
Netflix was subscription only, till it was "pay to get rid of ads". Then there is the whole business of profiling customer interest, etc.
We have product labeling for food, why not web services?
This is honestly very disappointing. Not using LLMs, but the complete lack of transparency about their usage. You can already see in the repository issues related to hallucinations[^1]. This is _fine_, but not if you seem to obscure the fact that these can be very, very wrong. This seems to only be mentioned in the very brief loading screen and at the bottom of the about page[^2]. Also, apparently many of the "core RSS feeds" are just... reddit[^3]???
For me, this is only useful as a curated list of news feeds (and subreddits I guess), but nothing more.
Ive stopped using all kagi stuff because of the lack in transparency and my official requests for transparency remained unanswered.
I don't trust any American corporation that refuses to be transparent.
US law allows for way to much dangerous stuff compared to the EU.
That is also why the US lost its democracy recently.
sites like these make me realize that i’m not all that interested in “news”, which might be a personal fault, but also makes you wonder what all the other “”news”” sites have been doing to capture my attention...
Another one you can check out is one I have made for myself and used by friends [1], although only tech news.
It also uses more than 100 RSS feeds to aggregate the top 10 news every few hours. Also has tags that can be used to read topic related news.
I'm just happy to be able to entirely remove topics like sports. Google News no longer lets you do this, and gleefully pushes topics on me even when I religiously press "Show fewer stories like this"; it is infuriating. No I do not care about celebrities or football; stop insisting that I do!
Exactly. I also wonder what the end game is. If creating content becomes a loss-making exercise, people will logically stop and the LLMs will have less and less to content to 'train on.' And as even large news corps are increasingly deploying internal LLMs, the deadening banal style of LLMs, A.I. over-view etc will inevitably drive readers away. I use Perplexity for search in place of Google and it surfaces good links most of the time. But what do tech and media companies - even spotify - think they will do when the artists, reporters and creatives stop feeding them? Or readers don't want to read banal summaries of everything?
It's unclear to me if any of the source material reported this when the summary was generated, especially since the source articles may have been updated throughout the day.
This doesn’t really seem to touch on the problem I have with news, which is that it is all doom and gloom, FUD and outrage. The headlines I saw:
Trump, Congress deadlock as shutdown deadline nears
Taliban cuts internet nationwide, flights grounded in Afghanistan
Indonesia school collapse leaves 38 missing, 77 hurt
YouTube settles Trump suspension lawsuit for $24.5m
German court jails AfD aide for China spying
US deports 120 Iranians after deal
Russian drone strike kills family of four
Is this really what I need to know in the world? Am I saying “informed”? This is not helping the anxiety from reading news described in the article. This is not good for people.
IIUC, the basis for this claim is that Kagi pays Yandex (a Russian search company) for access to Yandex's image search API. Is that the entirety of their link to Russia? If so, it seems like a stretch to accuse them of being a "Russian disinfo laundering service" (GP's words, not yours), but this is my first time hearing this, so if I'm missing something, I'm all ears.
You haven't been missing much. Just have been very sad to give up the best search after receiving that nice yellow t-shirt of theirs and not given even an option to opt out from Yandex. But war is war and even more so when its on your doorsteps. Sad story, is all.
Makes total sense. Please don't take my comment as a defense of Russia. I can understand not wanting any of your money flowing into the Russian economy, especially with Russian violence so close to home.
RSS is a strange choice in 2025. As a search engine they are in the position to extract things from web pages themselves. They already need this capability in order to properly rank the page.
For one, I welcome RSS (back) and say the more, the better. I much prefer to pull specific types of information at my own set intervals when I need them, instead of either having undifferentiated information pushed on me continuously like a blast from a fire hose, or having to reach out to manually check and filter many individual sources. The idea is to schedule my receipt and processing of the information, and then refine the stream itself as well as the intervals I use to view it and the total amount of time I spend on it.
I'm currently on the hunt for an RSS reader that has good filtering and sorting functionality, so I can (for instance) pull several feeds from only certain sources, but not see any posts/articles about terms A or B, yet see and sort any posts with term C by time, followed by either posts from source 1 with terms C and D, or posts from source 2 with terms E or F but not G, which would be sorted by relevance.
I know that's a complicated and probably poorly written explanation; but I'm imagining something like Apple Mail Rules for RSS.
I think Kagi's target audience is people who want to see news, and not people who want a RSS reader for news. The average person does not care how news gets to them. The fact that it uses RSS is a technical detail they should not have to worry about. Kagi should not be artificially restricting themselves to RSS feed when there is news that exists outside the RSS ecosystem which they should consider including.
Kagi's eventual target audience might be the average person, but right now its customers are almost certainly the type of people who mourned the shuttering of Google Reader.
Why? I do use it and can't imagine following anything without it... And I keep hoping that it will come back and replace absolutely terrible schizophrenic feeds from meta/x/etc
Because not every site has a RSS feed. For example when Claude Sonnet 4.5 released it would make sense to have that, but there is no RSS feed for Anthropic. Being compatible with the entire web instead of just a subset of it is useful.
Well... thanks to walled-garden policy from google whole web decided to erect walls instead of providing neat RSS. Though all websites I care about have RSS and if some doesn't I contact the admin and they add it…
I don't know of any major publisher that doesn't maintain RSS feeds, and this is mostly syndicating major publishers, so I'm not sure it makes any difference
I use RSS to get my information and I've built my own reader https://rahuldshetty.github.io/reader-project/ for it. It helps me stay upto date with my various news feed and sites at one place. I don't have to search for things in search engine all the time for a piece of news.
Just to be clear I'm understanding correctly:
This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?
I'm asking because that is what it looks like, but AI / LLMs are not specifically mentioned in this blog post, they just say news are 'generated' under the 'News in your language' heading, which seems to imply that is what they are doing.
I'm a little skeptical towards the approach, when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs, as far as I know there is no guarantee that those are correct – and it does seem like sometimes they just use pure LLM output, as no sources are cited, or it's quoted as 'common knowledge'.
Just for concrete confirmation that LLM(s) are being used, there's an open issue on the GitHub repository, on hallucinations with made up information, where a Kagi employee specifically mentions "an LLM hallucination problem":
https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97
There's also a line at the bottom of the about page at https://kite.kagi.com/about that says "Summaries may contain errors. Please verify important information."
Love how it only took 8 years to go from "Fake News!" to "News May Be Fake"
FWIW, as someone who has chosen to pay for Kagi for three years now:
- I agreee fake news is a real problem
- I pay for Kagi because I get more much more precise results[1]
- They have a public feedback forum and I think every time I have pointed out a problem they have come back with an answer and most of the time also a fix
- When Kagi introduced AI summaries in search they made it opt in, and unlike every other AI summary provider I had seen at that point they have always pointed to the sources. The AI might still hallucinate[2] but if it does I am confident that if I pointed it out to them my bug report would be looked into and I would get a good answer and probably even a fix.
[1]: I hear others say they get more precise Google results, and if so, more power to them. I have used Google enthusiastically since 2005, as the only real option from 2012, as fallback for DDG since somewhere between 2012 and 2022 and basically only when I am on other peoples devices or to prove a point since I started using Kagi in 2022
[2]: haven't seen much of that, but that might be because of the kind of questions I ask and the fact that I mostly use ordinary search.
To late to edit, but I probably started using Google somewhere between February 2001 and July 2003, not in 2005.
There's too much demand for fake news, plenty of subsidy for it, and it's far easier to make.
Non fake news is going to be restricted to pay services like Bloomberg terminals.
It is getting easier and easier to fake stuff and there are becoming less and less fully trusted institutions. So sadly I think you are right. Its scary but we are likely heading towards a future where you need to pay to get verified information and that itself will likely be segmented to different subscriptions for what information you want.
> Its scary but we are likely heading towards a future where you need to pay to get verified information
…are you describing a newspaper?
> It is getting easier and easier to fake stuff
This is why the moon landing hoax was revolutionary in the 60's. The size of this project was enormous.
As an American, confirmation that the landing was a hoax would make me even prouder than my current belief that it was real.
The moon landing was filmed. Problem is, Stanley Kubrick was such a perfectionist that he _demanded_ they film on location.
On the other hand, he shot Full Metal Jacket in England and not Vietnam, so maybe he was able to compromise ..
Yeah, they filmed it on Ganymede instead.
Haha, perhaps.
Well the thing is that technically information is free, but creating it is definitely not. So, if Ads are not paying for it, and people won't pay for it either, who does?
Fake news exists because of the perverses incentives of the system; where getting as many clicks as possible is what matters. This is very much a result of social networks and view-based remuneration.
I don't think it's that bad if people need to pay for real information...
Fake news mainly exist, because the need to disguise, manipulate and lie for power gains is probably a old as humanity.
It seems a challenging situation.. if you pay fact checkers you get accused of censorship by “weaponised free speech” and if you leave it to the community you get inconsistent results.
The first one sounds like it's an argument made by someone who never wanted the facts to begin with. Correcting misinformation is not stifling free speech.
I'm all for more proper fact checkers, backed by reputable sources.
Yes, this is the case. Fact checkers were kept alive by efforts of the big tech firms. Post Trump’s election, funding has been pulled globally.
And paid newspapers, hopefully.
At least we're going from Fake News from certain MAGA leaning sources at 75-90% fake to 99% actual news and 1% hallucinations?
Man am I tired of this stuff.
My LLM Investor Agent says we must keep investing in AI, tulips will always be worth more at a later date
[dead]
To take a moment to be a hopeless Stan for one of my all-time favorite companies: I don't think the summary above yours is fair, and I see why they don't center the summary part of it.
Unlike the disastrous Apple feature from earlier this year (which is still available, somehow!), this isn't trying to transform individual articles. Rather, it's focused on capturing broader trends and giving just enough info to decide whether to click into any of the source articles. That seems like a much smaller, more achievable scope than Apple's feature, and as always, open-source helps work like this a ton.
I, for one, like it! I'll try it out. Seems better than my current sources for a quick list of daily links, that's for sure (namely Reddit News, Apple News, Bluesky in general, and a few industry newsletters).
>giving just enough info to decide whether to click into any of the source articles.
If that info is hallucinated, then it's worse than useless. Click bait still attempts to represent the article, a hallucination isn't guaranteed to do thst.
Why not have someone properly vet out interesting and curious news and articles and provide traffic to their site? In this age of sincerity, proper citation is more vital than ever.
Yeah. I really like Kagi. This is a terrible idea.
1. It seems to omit key facts from most stories.
2. No economic value is returned to the sources doing the original reporting. This is not okay.
3. If your summary device makes a mistake, and it will, you are absolutely on the hook for libel.
There seem to be some misunderstandings about what news is and what’s makes it well-executed. It’s not the average, it’s the deepest and most accurate reporting. If anyone from the Kagi team wants to discuss, I’m a paying member and I know this field really, really well.
Thank you. Also a paying Kagi user because I like the idea that it’s worth it to pay for a good service. Ripping off journalists/newspapers content goes against that.
> It’s not the average, it’s the deepest and most accurate reporting.
Yes! I'm also a paying member but I'm deeply suspicious of this feature.
The website claims "we expose readers to the full spectrum of global perspectives", but not all perspectives are equal. It smacks of "all sides" framing which is just not what news ought to be about.
Yes, that's what it is. Kagi as a brand is LLM-optimist, so you may be fundamentally at odds with them here... If it lessens the issue for you, the sources of each item are cited properly in every example I tried, so maybe you could treat it as a fancy link aggregator
> Kagi as a brand is LLM-optimist
Kagi founder here. I am personally not an LLM-optimist. The thing is that I do not think LLMs will bring us to "Star Trek" level of useful computers (which I see humans eventually getting to) due to LLM's fundamentally broken auto-regressive nature. A different approach will be needed. Slight nuance but an important one.
Kagi as a brand is building tools in service of its users, no particular affinity towards any technologies.
You claimed reading LLM summaries will provide complete understanding. Optimistic would be a charitable description of this claim. And optimism is not limited to the most optimistic.
Another LLM-pragmatist here. I don't see why we should treat LLMs differently than any other tool in the box. Except maybe that it's currently the newest and most shiny, albeit still a bit clunky and overpriced.
Fwiw, I love your approach to AI. It's been very useful to me. Quick answers especially has been amazingly accurate and I've used it hundreds of times, if not thousands, and routinely check the links it gives
Happy Kagi Ultimate user here, so thank you!
I'm about as AI-pessimist as it gets, but Kagi's use of LLMs is the most tasteful and practical I've seen. It's always completely opt-in (e.g. "append a ? to your search query if you want an AI summary", as opposed to Google's "append a swear word to your search query if you don't want one"), it's not pushy, and it's focused on summarizing and aggregating content rather than trying to make it up.
FYI, you can append &udm=14 to Google searches to remove AI results and a bunch of the other clutter they've added.
I did that, and started getting flagged as a bot. Had to search elsewhere(Kagi) full time, or else suffer endless "find a bike" nonsense.
I think Google hates the loss of no/few ads or lame suggestions.
Google thinks the same of me and I don't even edit the URL. I can have a session working just fine one night and come back the next day, open a new tab to search for something, and get captcha'd to hell. I'm fairly sure they just mess with Firefox on purpose. I won't install Brave, Chrome, or Edge out of principle either. Safari works fine, but I don't like it.
Google will captcha me on the second or third search if I try to use the "site":" advanced keyword to narrow down search
I'm sorry I know how to use your tool?? ? Didn't you put these keywords in to be used?
Google has gotten amazingly hostile toward power users. I don't even try to use it anymore. It almost feels like they actively hate people that learned how to use their tools
Neat trick, any other params folks might want to know about?
I found this page that describes a variety of search parameter: https://susodigital.com/thoughts/the-mystery-of-the-google-u...
then i got the machine to write a front-end that visualises them and builds a search query for you: https://pastebin.com/HNwytYr9
enjoy
I consider myself a major LLM optimist in many ways, but if I'm receiving a once per day curated news aggregation feed I feel I'd want a human eye. I guess an LLM in theory might have less of the biases found in humans, but you're trading one kind of bias for another.
Indeed! A once per day human-curated news aggregation feed used to be called a "newspaper". You can still get them in some places, I believe.
This isn't really comparable. A newspaper is a single source. New York Times is a newspaper, CNN (a part of it) is a newspaper. Services like Kagi News, whether AI or human-curated, try to do aggregation and meta-analysis of many newspaper.
Yeah, I agree. The entire value/fact dichotomy that the announcement bases itself on is a pretty hot philosophical topic I lean against Kagi on. It's just impossible to summarize any text without imparting some sort of value judgement on it, therefore "biasing" the text
> It's just impossible to summarize any text without imparting some sort of value judgement on it, therefore "biasing" the text
Unfortunately, the above is nearly a cliché at this point. The phrase "value judgment" is insufficient because it occludes some important differences. To name just two that matter; there is a key difference between (1) a moral value judgment; (2) selection & summarization (often intended to improve information density for the intended audience).
For instance, imagine two non-partisan medical newsletters. Even if they have the same moral values (e.g. rooted in the Hippocratic Oath), they might have different assessments of what is more relevant for their audience. One could say both are "biased", but does doing so impart any functional information? I would rather say something like "Newsletter A is compromised of Editorial Board X with such-and-such a track record and is known for careful, long-form articles" or "Newsletter B is a one-person operation known for a prolific stream of hourly coverage." In this example, saying the newsletters differ in framing and intended audience is useful, but calling each "biased in different ways" is a throwaway comment (having low informational content in the Shannonian sense).
Personally, instead of saying "biased" I tend to ask questions like: (a) Who is their intended audience; (b) What attributes and qualities consistently shine through?; (c) How do they make money? (d) Is the publication/source transparent about their approach? (e) What is their track record about accuracy, separating commentary from factual claims, professional integrity, disclosure of conflicts of interest, level of intellectual honesty, epistemic standards, and corrections?
> The entire value/fact dichotomy that the announcement bases itself on
Hmmm. Here I will quote some representative sections from the announcement [1]:
>> News is broken. We all know it, but we’ve somehow accepted it as inevitable. The endless notifications. The clickbait headlines designed to trigger rather than inform, driven by relentless ad monetization. The exhausting cycle of checking multiple apps throughout the day, only to feel more anxious and less informed than when we started. This isn’t what news was supposed to be. We can do better, and create what news should have been all along: pure, essential information that respects your intelligence and time.
>> .. Kagi News operates on a simple principle: understanding the world requires hearing from the world. Every day, our system reads thousands of community curated RSS feeds from publications across different viewpoints and perspectives. We then distill this massive information into one comprehensive daily briefing, while clearly citing sources.
>> .. We strive for diversity and transparency of resources and welcome your contributions to widen perspectives. This multi-source approach helps reveal the full picture beyond any single viewpoint.
>> .. If you’re tired of news that makes you feel worse about the world while teaching you less about it, we invite you to try a different approach with Kagi News, so download it today ...
I don't see any evidence from these selections (nor the announcement as a whole) that their approach states, assumes, or requires a value/fact dichotomy. Additionally, I read various example articles to look for evidence that their information architecture group information along such a dichotomy.
Lastly, to be transparent, I'll state a claim that I find to be true: for many/most statements, it isn't that difficult nor contentious to separate out factual claims from value claims. We don't need to debate the exact percentages or get into the weeds on this unless you think it will be useful.
I will grant this -- which is a different point that what the commenter above made -- when reading various articles from a particular source, it can take effort and analysis to suss out the source's level of intellectual honesty, ulterior motives, and other questions I mention in my sibling comment.
[1]: https://blog.kagi.com/kagi-news
Don't worry, all those news articles are of course human curated.
(I say this sarcastically and unhappily)
Hard pass then. I’m a happy Kagi search subscriber, but I certainly don’t want more AI slop in my life.
I use RSS with newsboat and I get mainstream news by visiting individual sites (nytimes.com, etc.) and using the Newshound aggregator. Also, of course, HN with https://hn-ai.org/
> Also, of course, HN with https://hn-ai.org/
Ironically, this submission is at the top of that website :)
You can also convert regular newspapers into RSS feeds! NYTimes and Seattle Times have official RSS feeds, and with some scripting you can also get their article contents.
> when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs, as far as I know there is no guarantee that those are correct
A lot of times when I ask for a source, I get broken links. I'm not sure if the links existed at one point, or if the LLM is just hallucinating where it thinks a link should exist. CDN libraries, for example. Or sources to specific laws.
I monitor 404 errors on my website. ChatGPT frequently sends traffic to pages that never existed. Sometimes the information they refer to has never existed on my website.
For example: "/glossary/love-parade" - There is no mention of this on my website. "/guides/blue-card-germany" has always been at "/guides/blue-card". I don't know what "/guides/cost-of-beer-distribution" even refers to.
Definitely need an LLM to just generate it automatically on the fly! Welcome to the future! (Just kidding please don't (generate automatically))
Not quite this, but still relevant: https://www.ty-penguin.org.uk/~auj/spigot/
A great idea if you're looking to intentionally sabotage AI.
> A lot of times when I ask for a source,
They'll do pretty much everything you ask of them, so unless the text actually come from some source (via tool calls, injecting content into the context or other way), they'll make up a source rather than doing nothing, unless prompted otherwise.
On my llm, I have a prompt that condenses down to:
For every line of text output, give me a full MLA annotated source. If you cannot then say your source does not exist or you are generating information based on multiple sources then give me those sources. If you cannot do that, print that you need more information to respond properly.
Every new model I mess with needs a slightly different prompt due to safeguards or source protections. It is interesting when it lists a source that I physically own and their training data is deteriorated.
They could make up source, but ChatGPT is an actual app with complicated backend, not dumb pipe between textedit and GPU. Surely they could verify on server side every link they output to user before including it in the answer. I'm sure Codex will implement it in no time!
They surely can detect it, but what are they going to do after detecting it? Loop the last job with a different seed and hope that the model doesn't lie through its teeth? They won't be doing it because the model will gladly generate you a fake source on the next retry too.
This is actually harder then most think. The chances of your app doing this check being bot detected/blocked is very high.
(unless you are Google etc which are specifically let in to get the article indexed into search)
Maybe they should be trained on the understanding that making up a source is not "doing what you ask of them" when you ask for a source. It's actually the exact opposite of the "doing what you asked, not what you wanted" trope-- it's providing something it thinks you want instead of providing what you asked for (or being honest/erroring out that it can't).
Think for a second about what that means... this is a very easy thing to do IFF we already had a general purpose intelligence.
How do you make an LLM understand that it must only give factual sources? Just some naive RL with positive reward on the correct sources and negative reward on incorrect sources is not enough -- there are obscenely many more hallucinated sources possible, and the set of correct sources is a set of insanely tiny measure.
"Easy". You make the model distinguish between information and references to information. Information may be fabricated (for example, a fictional book is mostly composed of lies) but references are assumed to be factual (a link does point to something and is related to something). Factual information is true only to the degree that it is conveyed exactly, so the model needs to be able to store and reproduce references verbatim.
Of course, "easy" is in quotes because none of this is easy. It's just easier than AGI.
Wrong, just ask it about some non existent famous historical person and it will most likely tell you it didnt exist.
If you need to ask for a source in the first place, chances are very high that the LLM's response is not based on summarizing existing sources but rather exclusively quoting from memory. That usually goes poorly, in my experience.
The loop "create a research plan, load a few promising search results into context, summarize them with the original question in mind" is vastly superior to "freely associate tokens based on the user's question, and only think about sources once they dig deeper".
I'm genuinely asking, but have you tried it? https://kite.kagi.com
It actually seems more like an aggregator (like ground.news) to me. And pretty much every single sentence cites the original article(s).
There are nice summaries within an article. I think what they mean is that they generate a meta-article after combining the rest of them. There's nothing novel here.
But the presentation of the meta-article and publishing once a day feel like great features.
I have yeah, to me it looks like what I described in my comment above, it's LLM generated text, is it not?
> And pretty much every single sentence cites the original article(s).
Yeah but again, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think asking an LLM to provide a source / citation yields any guarantee that the text it generates alongside it is accurate.
I also see a lot of text without any citations at all, here are three sections (Historical background, Technical details and Scientific significance) that don't cite any sources: https://kite.kagi.com/s/5e6qq2
Oof, that one is particularly bad because it cites 3 sources which are all the same article.
Google points to phys and phys is a republish of the MIT article.
There's even a 'perspectives' section that tries to contrast two of the sources, but they're the same article.
I can envision the day where an LLM article generator starts consuming LLM generated articles which were sourced from single articles (co-written by an LLM).
They are LLM generated summaries, sure.
I guess I'm trying to understand your comment. Is there a distinction you're making between LLM summaries or LLM generated text, or are you stating that they aren't being transparent about the summaries being generated by LLMs (as opposed to what? human editors?).
Because at some point when I launched the app, it did say summaries might be inaccurate.
Looks like you found an example where it isn't properly citing the summaries. My guess is that they will tighten this up, because I looked mostly at the first and second page and most of those articles seemed to have citations in the summaries.
Like most people, I would want those everywhere to guard against potential hallucinations. No, the citations don't guarantee that there weren't any hallucinations, but if you read something that makes you go "huh" – the citations give you a low-friction opportunity to read more.
But another sibling commenter talked about the phys.org and google both pointing to the same thing. I agree, and this is exactly an issue I have with other aggregators like Ground.news.
They need to build some sort of graph that distills down duplicates. Like I don't need the article to say "30 sources" when 26 of them are just reprints of an AP/Reuters wire story. That shouldn't count as 30 sources.
> I guess I'm trying to understand your comment. Is there a distinction you're making between LLM summaries or LLM generated text, or are you stating that they aren't being transparent about the summaries being generated by LLMs (as opposed to what? human editors?).
The main point of my original comment was that I wanted to understand what this is, how it works and whether I can trust the information on there, because it wasn't completely clear to me.
I'm not super up to date with AI stuff, but my working knowledge is that I should never trust the output of an LLM and always verify it myself, so therefore I was wondering if this is just LLM output or if there is some human review process, or a mechanism related to the citation functions that makes it output of a different, more trusted category.
I did catch the message on the loading screen as well now, I do still think it could be a little more clear on the individual articles about it being LLM generated text, apart from that I think I understand somewhat better what it is now.
> No, the citations don't guarantee that there weren't any hallucinations, but if you read something that makes you go "huh" – the citations give you a low-friction opportunity to read more.
Either you mean every time you read something interesting (“huh”) you should check it. But in that case, why bother with reading the AI summary in the first place…
Or you mean that any time you read something that sounds wrong, you should check it. But in that case, everything false in the summaries that happens to sound true to you will be confirmed in your mind without you ever checking it.
> as opposed to what? human editors?
...yes? If I go to a website called "_ News" (present company included), I expect to see either news stories aggregated by humans or news stories written and fact checked by humans. That's why newspapers have fact checking departments, but they're being replaced by something with almost none of the utility and its proponents are framing the benefits of the old system as impossible or impractical.
I think you misunderstood my comment. I wasn't challenging the concept of human editors and fact checkers. I was asking a parent for a clarification of what the parent post meant by outlining that they were LLM generated summaries.
Like, I was asking whether they were expecting the curation/summarization to be done by humans at Kagi News.
Publishing once a day to remove the "slot machine dopamine hit" is worth it for that alone. I have forever been looking for a peer/replacement to Google News, I was about to pony up for a Ground News subscription but I'll probably hold off for a couple more months. Alternatives to google news have been sorely lacking for over a decade, especially since google news got their mobile-first redesign which significantly and permanently weakened the product to meet some product manager's bonus-linked KPI. One more product to wean off the google mothership. Gmail is gonna be real hard though.
> Gmail is gonna be real hard though.
Gmail seems like the easiest piece of the Google puzzle to replace. Different calendar systems have different quirks around repeating events, you sometimes need to try a variety of search engines to find what you're looking for, Docs aren't bug-for-bug equivalent to the Office or iCloud competitors, YouTube has audience, monetization, and hosting scale... Gmail is just "make an email account with a different provider and switch all of your accounts to use the new address." They don't even give you that much storage for free Gmail; it's 15GB, which lots of other email providers can match (especially paid ones). You can import your old emails to your new provider or just store them offline with a variety of email clients.
Is updating all of your accounts (and telling your contacts about the new address) what you consider to be the hard part, or do you actually use any Gmail-specific features? Genuinely curious, as I tend to disregard almost all mail-provider-specific features that any of my mail providers try to get me excited about (Gmail occasionally adds some new trick, but Zoho Mail is especially bad about making me roll my eyes with their new feature notifications).
I am sticking with this reprehensible company for email because their spam detection is awesome and I have found no clear measurements of detection to reasonably compare. I’d love to be proven wrong!
Switched from Gmail to Fastmail about 10 years ago.
2-3 spam emails slip through every week, and sometimes a false positive happens when I sign up for something new. I don't see this as a huge problem, and I doubt Gmail is significantly better.
Gmail significantly improved the email spam situation for everyone by aggressively pushing email security standards like DMARC/DKIM/SPF [1]. This came at the cost of basically no longer being able to selfhost your own email server though.
I agree with the other commenter, I use Fastmail and I get very few spam emails, most of which wouldn't have been detected by gmail either because they're basically legitimate looking emails advertising scams. I have a Gmail account I don't use and it seems like it receives about the same amount of spam, if not more.
1: https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/email-security/dma...
I don't understand how this once-per-day thing, very obviously a cost-cutting measure, can be taken seriously as a "feature". Stories evolve throughout the day. If this is truly important to you, just screen shot Google News, then look at the screen shot all day.
I am fine with it using AI but it makes me feel pretty icky that they didn’t mention that this was ai/llm generated at any point in this article. That’s a no-no IMO, and has turned me off this pretty strongly.
Why do you care what technology was used to generate the summaries? What if they had used their old NLP summarizer?
They don't explicitly say they generate summaries at any point in the article. In fact I read it and though this was just some fancy RSS aggregator. The way they describe the "daily briefing" is extremely ambiguous.
OK, but I'd like to repeat my question here: Why do you care how the summary was generated?
I'm not the person you asked, but it's useful to know if the summary was generated using a method prone to inaccuracy.
That's all methods, though. Have you seen humans?
In this situation, humans are more accurate, for now, so it's good information to have.
Same as I would like to know if humans self assessed in a study about how well they drive vs the empirical evidence. Humans just aren't that good at that task so it would be good to know coming in.
Just call it Kagi Vibes instead of Kagi News as news has a higher bar (at least for me)
I'm not sure I agree that humans are more accurate at summarizing, but I don't have data, so I'll take your word for it.
I'd point to Wikipedia. You can say the content is "wrong". But the links go to the right place.
In my experience with Claude research, the links ~always go to the right place.
different kinds of inaccuracy
I find it more distasteful that they weren’t transparent about their method than the method being AI.
But they have updated the text now, which is nice!
Sure, but it's useful to know what kind of inaccuracies to look for.
Someone needs to coin the fallacy that, when anyone criticises LLMs, the speaker retorts with "but how humans are any better?"
I've seen it so many times it definitely needs a name. As an entity of human intelligence, I am offended by these silly thought-terminating arguments.
It's called "the perfect world fallacy".
At least I want to know that it’s a summary and not the actual content of any article.
Many reasons, if this news were summarised by humans I would prefer it, one example reason is with AI summaries I know to look out for hallucinations.
To be honest though that’s not the point. I’m more annoyed they weren’t transparent about their methods than I am about them using AI.
Kagi team member here who helped author that blog post announcement. That's a fair point, and we've updated the post to now clearly mention that we use AI for the daily briefing. Thank you for your feedback!
Thank you!
I'm firmly on the side of "AI" skepticism, but even I have to admit that this is a very good use of the tech. LLMs generally do a great job at summarizing text, which is essentially what this is. The sources could be statically defined in advance, given that they know where they pull the information from, so I don't think the LLM generates that content.
So if this automates the process of fetching the top news from a static list of news sites and summarizing the content in a specific structure, there's not much that can go wrong there. There's a very small chance that the LLM would hallucinate when asked to summarize a relatively short amount of text.
It's useful for the users, but tragically bad for anyone involved with journalism. Not that they're not used to getting fucked by search engines at this point, be it via AMP, instant answers, or AI overviews.
Not that the userbase of 50k is big enough to matter right now, but still...
What journalism? Most of these sites copy their content from each other or social media, and give it their own spin. Nowadays most of them use AI anyway.
Actual journalism doesn't rely on advertising, and is subscription based. Anyone interested in that is already subscribed to those sources, but that is not the audience this service is aiming for. Some people only want to spend a few minutes a day catching up with major events, and this service can do that for them. They're not the same people who would spend hours on news sites, so these sites are not missing any traffic.
Broadly agreed, I don't consider the CBS (national) news website to be a source of hard hitting journalism; Reuters, however, is. Reuters and the AP are often the source of these news stations.
I continue to subscribe to Reuters because of the quality of journalism and reporting. I have also started using Kagi News. They are not incompatible.
All this is doing is aggregating RSS feeds and linking to the original articles.
So this might result in lower traffic for "anyone involved in journalism" – but the constant doomscrolling is worse for society. So I think we can all agree that the industry needs to veer towards less quantity and more quality.
RSS feeds are meant to be used by actual users, not regurgitated publicly. RSS readers at the very least have have author info visible and its users tend to be reported to website's analytics with a special user agent.
I see! One thing I'm wondering: They say they are fetching the content from the RSS feeds of news outlets rather than scraping them, I haven't used RSS in a bit, but I recall most news outlets would usually not include the full article in their feed but just the headline or a small summary. I'd be worried that articles with misleading headlines (which are not uncommon) might cause this tool to generate incorrect news items, is that not a concern?
That's a fair concern, and I would prefer it if they scraped the sites instead. They could balance this out by favoring content from sites that do provide the entire article in their feeds, but that could lead to bias problems. Maybe this is why their own summaries are short. We can't know for sure unless they explain how it works.
We used to do this with a human created meta tag but I guess this is better?
If the parent commenter is correct, the concern I'd have would be about transparency. Even if it's good at what it does, I don't think we're anywhere close to a place as a society where it shouldn't be explicit when it's being used for something like this.
This also is a really ignorant approach to data poisoning issues in the LLM space. LLMs can easily be misused as propaganda machines...
It's not binary - it's a continuum.
When you go to Google News, the way they group together stories is AI (pre-LLM technology). Kagi is merely taking it one step further.
I agree with your concern. I see this as a convenient grouping, and if any interests me I can skip reading the LLM summary and just click on the sources they provide (making it similar to Google News).
> Kagi is merely taking it one step further.
I would argue creating your own summary is several steps beyond an ordering algorithm.
It cannot be "one step further", because there's a clear break in reality between what Google News provides and Kagi provides. Google News links to an article that exists in our world, 100%, no chance involved. Kagi uses an LLM generate text and thus is entirely up to chance.
Devil's advocate here.
Do you know that's what they're doing? They are a search engine after all. They do run their own indexer, as well as cache results from other sources.
If they're feeding urls to an AI, why can't they validate AI output urls are real? Maybe they do.
I don't care.
> When you go to Google News
You don't and you should not use this one either.
It also publishes normal unabridged rss feed that you can read with rss reader of your choice, it looks like great news source
I just don’t understand what this brings into the picture. Presumably your newspaper of choice already has
A) redacted the news in a format that is read friendly
B) set up a page with prioritized news
Because _that’s what a newspaper is_.
What extra value is gotten from a AI rewrite? At best is a borderline noop, at worst a lossy transformation (?)
> when you ask an LLM to point to 'sources' for the information it outputs,
Services listing sources, like Kagi news, perplexity and others don't do that. They start with known links and run LLMs on that content. They don't ask LLMs to come up with links based on the question.
That is what I mean yeah, I’m not saying it’s fabricating sources from training data, that would obviously be impossible for news articles, I’m saying if you give it a list of articles A, B and C including their content in the context and ask ‘what is the foo of bar?’ and it responds ‘the foo of bar is baz, source: article B paragraph 2’, that does not tell you whether the output is actually correct, or contained in the cited source at all, unless you manually verify it.
This seems like the opposite of "privacy by design"
> Privacy by design: Your reading habits belong to you. We don’t track, profile, or monetize your attention. You remain the customer and not the product.
But the person running the LLM surely does.
How would the LLM provider get any information about your reading habits from the app? The LLM is used _before_ the news content is served to you, the reader.
The line “news stories will be generated” throws up red flags across the horizon for me.
That’s not news. That’s news-adjacent random slop.
It's also a workaround around copyright, news sites would be (rightfully) pissed if you publicly post their articles in full and would argue that you're stealing their viewership. But, if you're essentially doing an automatic mash-up of five stories on the same topic from different sources, all of a sudden you're not doing anything wrong!
As an example from one of their sources, you can only re-publish a certain amount of words from an article in The Guardian (100 commercially, 500 non-comercially) without paying them.
tbh I would take the headline and first hundred words in a news aggregator. that seems fine?
Yes, that is fine! That's how RSS feeds usually work when you follow more "mainstream" news sources. At the very least, you see the name of the author and you actually make a connection to their server that can be measured in the analytics.
But instead, Kagi "helpfully" regurgitates the whole story, visits the article once, delivers it to presumably thousands, and it can't even be bothered to display all of the sources it regurgitates unless you click to expand the dropdown. And even then the headline itself is one additional click away, and they straight up don't even display the name of the journalist in the pop-up, just the headline.
Incredibly shitty behaviour from them. And then they have the balls to start their about page with this:
> Why Kagi News? Because news is broken.
And yet, after trying it, I have to admit it's more informative and less provocative than any other news source I've seen since at least 2005.
I don't know how they do it, and I'm not sure I care, the result is they've eliminated both clickbait and ragebait, and the news are indeed better off for it!
Soulless, uncreative, not fact-checked (or read by anyone before clicking publish), not contributing anything back to the original journalists, all of the editorial decisions are done by an undeterministic AI filter.
Not gonna call it the worst insult to journalism I've ever seen because I've seen factually(.)so which does essentially the same thing but calls it an "AI fact check", but it's not much better.
It's like instead of borrowing a book from the library, there's like a spokesperson at the entrance who you ask a question and then blindly believe whatever they say.
>soulless,uncreative
This is exactly how I want my news to be. Nothing worse than a headline about a new vaccine breakthrough, followed by a first paragraph that starts with "it was a cold November morning as I arrived in..."
I guess it's a matter of taste, but I prefer it short and to the point
Yes, they are not the only player here. Quite a few companies are doing this, if you use Perplexity, they also have a news tab with the exact feature set.
> if you use Perplexity, they also have a news tab with the exact feature set
"Exact" is far from accurate. I just did a side-by-side comparison. To name only two obvious differences:
A. At the top level, Perplexity has a "Discover" tab [1] -- not titled "News". That leads to a AAF page with the endless-scroll anti-pattern (see [2] [3] for other examples). Kagi News [4] presents a short list of ~7ish items without images.
B. At the detail-page level, Kagi organizes their content differently (with more detail, including "sources", "highlights", "perspectives", "historical background", and "quick questions"). Perplexity only has content with sources and "discover more". You can verify for yourself.
[1]: https://www.perplexity.ai/discover
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/rant/comments/e0a99k/cnn_app_is_ann...
[3]: https://www.tumblr.com/make-me-imagine/614701109842444288/an...
[4]: https://kite.kagi.com
After using Perplexity, its news tab is US-centric, without much options to get regional content from what i can see.
Kagi seems to offer regional news and the sources appear to be from the respective area also. do appreciate public access (for now?) with RSS feeds (ironic but handy).
ML did not figure out every solution on planet earth. It figured out the LLM, and that is the giant's shoulder most apps will stand on.
Maybe you should read the article before you assume how it works. It’s pretty clear and AI is specifically mentioned.
You’re being presumptuous. I read the article yesterday and there was no mention of AI or LLMs, they have changed it, which is good.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250930154005/https://blog.kagi...
Thanks for pointing out that this is yet more AI slop. Very disappointing for Kagi to do this. I get my money's worth from searches, but if I was looking for more features I would want them to be not AI-based.
I guess they embed the news of the day and let it summarize it. You can add metadata to the training set, which you should technically query reliably. You don't have to let the model do the summarization of the source, which can be erroneous.
Far more interesting is how they aggregate the data. I thought many sources moved behind paywalls already.
Kagi is probably the only pro-LLM company praised on HN. Perhaps people's hatred towards Google outweighs that of LLM.
Imagine if Google news use LLM to show summaries to the users without explicitly saying it's AI on the UI.
Ironically, one of the first LLM-induced mistakes experienced by average people was a news summary: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cge93de21n0o.amp
> Kagi is probably the only pro-LLM company praised on HN.
Kagi made search useful again, and their genAI stuff can be easily ignored. Best of both worlds -- it remains useful for people like myself who don't want genAI involved, but there's genAI stuff for people who like that sort of thing.
That said, if their genAI stuff gets to be too hard to ignore, then I'd stop using or praising Kagi.
That this is about news also makes it less problematic for me. I just won't see it at all, since I don't go to Kagi for news in the first place.
I'm not against AI summaries if they are marked as so. Sneakily sliding LLM under the table is a dark pattern no matter how I interpret their intentions.
Even Google calls the overview box AI Overview (not saying it doesn't hurt content hosting sites.)
Disappointing. Non-LLM NLP summarization is actually rather good these days. It works by finding the key sentences in the text and extracting the relevant sections, no possibility for hallucination. No need to go full AI for this feature.
That’s interesting. Could you share an example or a resource about this?
i believe an llm output is fine for giving an overview if provided the articles, if you want a detailed overview you should be reading the articles anyways.
> One daily update: We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual.
I might not agree with all decisions Kagi makes, but this is gold. Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you're a consumer not a customer.
> Endless scrolling is a big indicator that you're a consumer not a customer.
Someone recently highlighted the shift from social networks to social media in a way I'd never thought about:
>> The shift from social networks to social media was subtle, and insidious. Social networks, systems where you talk to your friends, are okay (probably). Social media, where you consume content selected by an algorithm, is not. (immibis https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45403867)
Specifically, in the same way that insufficient supply of mortgage securities (there's a finite number of mortgages) led to synthetic CDOs [0] in order to artificially boost supply of something there was a market for.
Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from strangers into your eyeballs) are the synthetic CDOs of content, with about the same underlying utility.
There is in fact a finite amount of individually useful content per unit of time.
[0] If you want the Michael Lewis-esque primer on CDOs https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=A25EUhZGBws
> Social media and 24/7 news (read: shoving content from strangers into your eyeballs) is the synthetic CDO of content, with about the same underlying utility.
This is a great way to put it. Much of the social media content is a derivative/synthetic representation of actual engagement. Content creators and influencers can make us "feel" like we have a connection to them (eg: "get ready with me!" type videos), but it's not the same as genuine connection or communication with people.
Parasocial relationships have always been a thing. People felt like they 'knew' celebrities and would commit weird acts of stalking or violence when that worldview was shattered.
but now it's ABSOLUTELY EVERYWHERE and almost completely socially acceptable. In fact, people look at you weird if you don't have a favorite youtuber or what-have-you.
It's not healthy. Not healthy one bit. Whereas it used to be for 'others' (meaning rich and famous people who lived lives we could never hope for), parasocial relationships tend to be focused on people who are 'just like us' now. There's probably something in there to be studied.
CDO = collateralized debt obligation.
Please expand obscure acronyms, not everyone lives in your niche.
There's literally a link to an explanation.
I agree but I also would like to see yesterday's news. 12 articles is a little to few for me. I would like to come back every couple of days and review what happened.
This is one of the big reasons I've gravitated towards a reverse-chronological feed that takes you from the past to the present -- at some point you hit a natural end, which is a natural prompt to go do something else. I've picked up Reeder[0] as a feed reader, since it can aggregate a bunch of sources (chiefly RSS, but also Mastodon, BlueSky, reddit, etc) and presents it in such a timeline without pressure to read everything.
[0] https://reederapp.com
I am seeing this app mentioned after years. When did this one move to subscription model - it was a one time paid app? Found it - it's also available as Reeder Classic on mac app store.
Anyway, there's this https://netnewswire.com - https://github.com/Ranchero-Software/NetNewsWire (mac native) if someone is looking for an open source alt.
The one-time payment app and NetNewsWire (both excellent RSS readers themselves!) take a different approach than the subscription-only version of Reeder: they treat RSS more like email (with an emphasis on reading everything, or at least marking it as read).
About a year ago I switched my news reading habits.
Now I just read the news on a Sunday (unless I'm doing something much more exciting). For the remainder of the week I don't read the news at all. It's the way my grandad used to read the news when he was a farmer.
I've found it to be a convenient format. It let's you stay informed, while it gives enough of a gap for news stories to develop and mature (unless they happen the day before). There's less speculation and rumours, and more established details, and it has reduced my day-to-day stress.
Annoyingly I still hear news from people around me, but I try to tune it out in the moment. I can't believe I used to consume news differently and it baffles me why I hear of people reading/watching/listening to the news 10+ times per day, including first thing when they awaken and last thing before they sleep. Our brains were not designed for this sort of thing.
I am not so sure. It currently highlights a story from Munich, and in addition to a few factual errors, the information is simply outdated; there have been numerous new relevant developments. (I also don't understand the selection of sources. Aljazeera? rt.com? South China Morning Post? As if there weren't enough sources of original reporting right from Germany.)
I would agree that a single daily news update is useful (and healthy), but this must also be reflected in the choice of topics and the type of reporting.
I think this is the wrong direction. We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators.
Summaries are no substitute for real articles, even if they're generated by hand (and these apparently are not). Summaries are bound to strip the information of context, important details and analysis. There's also no accountability for the contents.
Sure, there are links to the actual articles, but let's not kid ourselves that most people are going to read them. Why would they need a summarizing service otherwise? Especially if there are 20 sources of varying quality.
There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed. I'll be harsh: this service strikes me as informationally illiterate person's idea of what getting informed is like.
Also, they talk about "echo chambers" and "full spectrum of global perspectives". Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory, but how far should it go?
Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context? Should an article about an airplane crossing the Pacific include "some experts believe that this is impossible because Earth is flat?"
Excessive bias in media is definitely a problem, but I don't think that completely unbiased media can exist while still being useful. In my expierence, people looking for it either haven't thought about it deeply enough, or they just want information that doesn't make their side look bad.
> Representing all perspectives sounds great in theory
A bigger bias problem by far is bias by omission, so including all stories whether they meet the presenter's political agenda or not would be a great start.
Who decides whether or not a given perspective is in the overton window?
> Should all politicians' remarks be reproduced verbatim with absolutely no commentary, no fact-checking and no context?
Yes. That's an interview, and is much better than summarizations and short soundbites and one-sentence quotes.
This presupposes that you have an informed population that already knows the facts and context
Just printing whatever lies a politician or CEO says without any context or pushback is not a useful “news” source. You could just follow them on social media if you are into that sort of thing.
Interviews have been a core part of serious journalism for much longer than you or me have been alive. If you want to be informed on a deeper level, you have to read or listen to interviews.
World leaders will always lie or side-step the truth in lesser or bigger degrees, because they represent a people or an organizations and committed fully to the interest of those. Part of being mature as a listener or reader is understanding that, and still get the useful information you need. Every person you meet in life will first and foremost speak from their own interest and agenda.
Then these interviews are complemented by regular reporting and interviews with people from the opposing viewpoint, if you so wish.
> We need better journalism, not better summarizing aggregators.
I agree, but how do you envision that happening? Journalism died a long time ago, arguably around the birth of the 24-hour news cycle, and it was further buried by social media. A niche tech company can only provide a better way to consume what's out there, not solve such large societal problems.
> There are no "lifehacks" to getting informed.
I don't think their intent is to change how people are informed. What this aims to do is replace endless doomscrolling on sites that are incentivized to rob us of our attention and data, with spending a few minutes a day to get a sense of general events around the world. If something piques your interest, you can visit the linked sources, or research the event elsewhere. But as a way of getting a quick general overview of what's going on, I think it's great.
We're seeing success with giving journalists better tools to create engaging journalism (which HN hates :). Many outlets are now seeing that they have to once more prove their value, and there exists some really great subscription-only media here in the Nordics and France.
That's precisely what Axios does, and they make money from this (and they don't list their sources). So I can see Kagi pursuing this.
FWIW, I agree with you.
I used to be a news junkie. I've always thought of writing the lessons I learned, but one of them was "If you're a casual news reader, you are likely more misinformed than the one who doesn't read any news." One either should abstain or go all in.
I guess I'd amend it to put people who only glance at headlines to be even more misinformed. It was not at all unusual for me to read articles where the content just plain disagreed with the headline!
Kagi seems to be one of the few companies that put out services, genuinely trying to fix things with good intent. I hope it stays that way.
(I was very skeptical about Kagi Assistant but now i am a happy Kagi Ultimate subscriber).
I like assistant, but I use Claude directly mostly. It's handy for really quick stuff though.
I like that Kagi charges for their service, so their motive is to provide services for that cost, and not with ads on top of it.
It feels much less slimy to pay a nominal fee for a service than it does to use a "free" service and wonder about how / to what extent your data is being exploited.
100% agree. Free services have their place, but I'd love to have more paid service alternatives for derives that only exist as "free".
That said, all my friends think I'm insane and poke fun at me for paying for search, so I imagine we're a small minority.
People just hate paying for software in general in my experience, especially a subscription.
I have multiple good friends who refuse to pay 99 cents a month to get 50gb of iCloud storage so they can backup their phones, and instead of all their precious memories on a single device that is out and about.
It's pretty well established that people are just generally irrational about free things. Because of this, I think any business model involving giving something away for free, whether it's a loss leader or or ad supported or something else, is fundamentally anti-competetive. Cognitive biases place any competitor charging for the good/service at a disadvantage. If you're a non profit, go ahead and give things away. If you're a business, you should have to charge.
I think the whole "if it's free, you're the product" nugget of information has not been broadly understood by folks, or if it has, maybe folks don't care as much about their data.
I do live these days with the understanding that pretty much all of my personal info is out there one way or another, a social security number is about as private as a phone number these days.
I think people genuinely don't realize how invasive the data gathered is. If they knew what engineers and admins can see, they'd be floored
Totally, I think there are lots of assumptions of its just the data they explicitly put into the system, eg: "likes", "comments", "photos", but not the darker side of correlating activity across sites, interests, building profiles of you, selling your history, etc.
It gets worse the more you think about it. When you are paid by how much attention you give, clickbait and ragebait thrives.
I'm curious, aside from pricing, what utility do you get from Assistant that you wouldn't from just subscribing directly to a single LLM?
The Kagi implementation can use Kagi search and can use advanced features of search like lenses. This isn't a unique feature but if you believe Kagi search is better than whoever Anthropic/OpenAI are using it's a nice plus.
Kagi's contracts with LLM providers are the ones businesses get with actual privacy protections which is also nice.
Actually, i get the news search with a quick answer and a link to the assistent and not a single LLM but practically all LLMs in one interface and can link and share the chats. The Interface is nice, simple and Kagi is very up to date regarding new LLMs (it already contains Sonnet 4.5, for example).
It's just a nice interface for all LLMs which i often use on mobile or laptop for various work and also private tasks.
The last months have shown that there is no single LLM worth investing in (todays "top" LLM is tomorrows second-in-class).
> subscribing directly to a single LLM
You get multiple LLM in a single interface, with a single login and a single subscription to maintain, all your threads stored at the same place, the ability to switch between models in a thread, custom models...
KI multi-step asisstant. Being able to try out all the llms in one subscription. Search integration with Kagi which means AI can really search only pages I want. And my settings for search as well.
I used Kagi search for awhile but eventually switched back to google because Kagi location aware search sucks. It might be better nowadays. I’ve been living on their browser Orion for a few weeks now though and it’s great. It works about 90% of the time which is impressive for a browser that isn’t tested alongside the big 4
What do you mean 90%? Orion is WebKit under the hood, so any failures would be surprising.
Clearly there is divergence. Examples that I run into on a daily basis:
My credit union login does an infinite redirect on login. Works fine on Chrome (and all other major browsers)
Perplexity on the mobile version web search entirely broken. Loops with some error and becomes unresponsive. Works fine on safari.
Many other random stuff breaks at least a few times per day usually from login redirects and authentication. Extensions like 1Password have autofill only working some of the time. The list goes on
Most of their failures are usually on their custom features instead of basic WebKit / Safari functionality, in my experience. As a basic browser it’s great, but I consistently have issues with 1Password logins, especially if passkeys are involved. That isn’t necessarily their fault but the end result of me being unable to use their browser is the same. And if I’m going to use a basic browser I might as well use Safari and not deal with any third party software.
They use a custom fork of WebKit with many features added
What everyone gets wrong about news curation is thinking people want the same news as everyone else, or "both sides" of a situation, or whatever mechanism for exposing them to things that someone else thinks are true.
What I actually want is a curated set of things that are useful to me personally given my situation. The most important things about my situation to give me useful news are things like: net worth, income, citizenship, family situation, where I live, what industries I work in, current investments, travel destinations, regulatory and political risks associated with any of those things, etc.
Because those are the things that dictate how the parts of the world I can't control are going to affect me (especially if I don't react). I don't want to hear about random things that aren't going to affect me when I'm looking at the news. Sometimes I want to learn new random/useless things for fun, but that's a leisure activity. It's totally separate from the "news", which is a thing that adults consume as a chore to better plan their lives.
The fundamental problem is that myself and others are not going to willing give out the personal information required to curate useful news feeds, so the news will always be filled with noise. Maybe local AI can help with that.
ChatGPT Pulse has actually done a great job at this for me. It knows about an upcoming vacation I have planned and gave me some specific news about closures and events there, with recommendations on what activities to book in advance.
I like Kagi and want them to succeed. But currently (according to LinkedIn) theres 26 employees. They are building search, LLM assistant wrappers, a browser and now news. Please don't overextend the same way Proton is currently doing.
I used to love Proton, but they focus too much on feature development instead of stability and fixing long-standing bugs. E.g. zooming has been broken for years in ProtonMail on iOS. Some emails won’t even render at all :(
Yup, i quit Proton (Mail) for the same reason. I had been using it for a long time… There are so many little bugs and annoyances, it’s frustrating to see new features being released all the time while obvious bugs and shortcomings are not fixed.
It was a very big relief going back to a normal email client.
I still support Proton (i pay for Proton VPN) and hope they will succeed in their mission.
FWIW, I have not had any issues with email rendering in the iOS app so YMMV. Have not noticed any zooming problems.
How is Proton over extending? All of their services are pretty great imo. I'm happy with them. Doesn't mean I am ever going to use their bitcoin wallet app thing, but if they want to build it, great, they know their customer base so it's probably not out of left field.
In the drive mobile app you cant even download a folder. There has been issues opened on it for almost a year now and since then they've opened two entirely new services and added many extra features.
When you're paying for something you expect the basics to be there and thats what annoys me about proton.
A similar one for Kagi: All other popular search engines have an alternative URL that enforces safesearch, allowing IT admins/parents to prevent safesearch being turned off at a DNS level (e.g. forcesafesearch.google.com, strict.bing.com). Kagi's had an open request for one for 3½ years[1] and it was recently downgraded in status away from Planned.
[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/3285-safe-search-dns-locking-for-...
Buggy as hell. Proton Drive cost me a weekend and they lost me for life.
…They are also building email
I'm waiting until they announce their own smartphone OS before accepting they are following in the footsteps of Google.
I mean, it keeps bothering me that their search engine logo is a "g". Anything to position themselves as close to google.
I like this a lot, going to try it! One issue i have though is in the current world of LLMs scraping content, i'd prefer there to be more discussion about compensation of authors.
I know the announcement page talks about not scraping, but to me personally the value i see in this product is that i don't have to go to those ad ridden, poorly organized and often terrible pages of the authors. Which then seems really unfair to the actual content providers.
I'd like to see this type of service cost $3-5/m ontop of my normal Kagi sub to compensate the authors of the articles i read. A Streaming Music model for news, ish.
This proposed value is quite small, but my assumption is only a very small amount of money would reach them from my ad views anyway so a $10/m addition feels extreme to me.
> One daily update: We publish once per day around noon UTC, creating a natural endpoint to news consumption. This is a deliberate design choice that turns news from an endless habit into a contained ritual.
Could you guys maybe print it on paper and send it to my physical mailbox, so I can do this ritual with breakfast? :-)
Potentially relevant:
Guten: A Tiny Newspaper Printer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42599599 - January 2025 (106 comments)
Getting my daily news from a dot matrix printer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41742210 - October 2024 (253 comments)
I'd like mine shaped like a cylinder waiting on the door step.
Make sure to make each page way too large to read it on public transit or a table in a cafe without having your seat neighbors join in on the fun :)
Why not release an editorial format designed to be printed, and you could just print it yourself?
Given that Orion (which I repeatedly attempt to daily drive due to the dearth of browsers meeting my requirements right now on macos) is still full of bugs that hamper usability, and seems to introduce new ones with every update, I don't know why Kagi insists on overextending itself like this. They just started porting their broken browser to Linux, they're creating a maps app, all while they clearly do not have the manpower to finish the projects they've already started.
Which bugs do you encounter? Orion works nearly perfectly for me.
A selection of recent ones:
- Site blocking with /etc/hosts doesn't work consistently with Orion, it intermittently and inconsistently ignores these rules. (this is sort of niche but it's bizarre for a browser based on WebKit)
- The password manager is busted on certain websites that have a third input box (so a captcha or 2FA code), where it'll fill the password twice
- Kept randomly getting the error "Orion can't open this page: This operation couldn't be completed. Cannot allocate memory" with like 10 windows, ~30 tabs open. Haven't seen it recently but like many Orion bugs it is intermittent and hard to reproduce consistently.
- Switching between Chrome and Orion sometimes (inconsistently) switches me to the last Orion window I had open (often on a different Desktop) rather than the one I clicked on.
- On networks where I can form WebRTC connections in Safari and Chrome, I cannot in Orion.
- This was just fixed but until like yesterday, the highlight color in their PDF viewer for ctrl F was a barely visible 10% opacity highlight that was totally unusable.
- Various other intangible performance bugs that seem to pile up when you haven't restarted in a day or two. It starts out really snappy and tends to get slower the longer you've had it open.
I should note that the pace of developement would be much faster if they would open source the browser, but instead of that they keep starting new, closed source projects that will likely have the same fate. Their Linux Orion port is from scratch, none of their macOS code is reusable.
> - Site blocking with /etc/hosts doesn't work consistently with Orion, it intermittently and inconsistently ignores these rules. (this is sort of niche but it's bizarre for a browser based on WebKit)
oh i hate it when developers get cute with DNS. this doesn't happen with Safari? i've also had issues with the password manager (even after telling it i want to use Passwords, it just... doesn't sometimes).
i've been in the same boat as you - i really want to diversify the browser ecosystem, so i've been daily driving orion for a bit, but their stance toward open source (which you mentioned) is a big bummer.
hmm last time i tried it, Safari blocked the sites correctly as did Chrome. just tried it again and Safari let me through, so maybe that one's not on Orion.
> This is pulling the content of the RSS feeds of several news sites into the context window of an LLM and then asking it to summarize news items into articles and fill in the blanks?
This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't exist, Kagi wouldn't work.
This is true in a big picture sense but that's not the concern of someone who's making a tool meant to be useful to users. The consequences of this existing will be what they will be.
Given the buzzword, social media, and advertising infested garbage that ~80% of news sites have turned into...it's hard to sympathize with them.
The content isn't any better, so a news aggregator simply becomes an aggregator of buzzword, advertising infested slop. Garbage in, garbage out.
> This is awful. It's cutting out any money going to the news agencies that go out there and write news. If they didn't exist, Kagi wouldn't work.
Why would Kagi stop working if news didn't exist? Kagi is a search engine first and foremost, Kagi News is not a money making product of theirs. Kagi would still be making money with their search engine.
Also, this should entice news writers to write better news. The main reason people use products such as this is that they are sick and tired of going to news sites only to have to power through filler material to get the 10% that actually matters...
Big news junkie but I don't feel the need to buy into Kagi's ecosphere personally as a SearXNG user. The article touches on signal over noise and I have found two solutions that work for me as a news junkie:
News Minimalist [1] and Boring Report [2]. Both aggregate news and (IMO) most importantly provide links from multiple outlets for the same stories. Really made me notice the clickbait and allows me to be more selective in choosing reputable sources.
Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on importance, while the latter summarizes articles. (That doesn't feel useful for supporting journalism as a whole so I typically click through and read the articles unless I don't like the outlet reporting)
[1] https://www.newsminimalist.com/
[2] https://www.boringreport.org/app
News Minimalist with the cute turtle header has become my daily "newspaper"
> Both use AI, with the former ranking news based on importance
I like this! If I'm in a rush, I check for very high priority stories. Usually there are 3 or even none. Done!
On days I want to sit back and read, it provides nice sources.
I've been using this since the beta launch, and I really like it. They're spot on about news being broken.
That said, I do think the service could be improved. Often the summary is a very short blurb that forces me to go to one of the original sites for the content, and hopefully land on one that is not obnoxious to use, which kind of defeats the purpose. The event timeline sounds interesting, but when it essentially shows 2 or 3 events that are obvious from the context, it's not so useful in practice. I always skip the "Quick questions" section, since it reads like an elementary school report, and the questions are really basic. How about letting me ask the questions I want?
Also:
> We don’t scrape content from websites. Instead, we use publicly available RSS feeds that publishers choose to provide.
I think this is a mistake. Most publishers are hostile to RSS and often don't offer it. Scraping is, unfortunately, a requirement if you want to consume public content on your own terms, which is the entire point of this service. Besides, scraping is how all search engines generate their index, so as long as the bot is well behaved and doesn't hammer the site, follows robots.txt or perhaps even bends the rules a bit, it should be fine. I would rather Kagi wasn't so respectful of publishers' wishes, if that would allow them to offer a better service. I understand if they want to avoid getting in trouble with publishers, but the alternative would be better for their users.
lol I added 'trump', 'republican', and 'democrat' as custom filter keywords and now it's showing zero stories in the USA category. So apparently, that category is a stand in for politics? Although I have the Thai category enabled (since I live there) and that's all run of the mill national (non political) news.
Nice release nonetheless!
It’s probably hard to find an article these days that doesn’t mention one of those words (except maybe celebrity gossip). The world we live in.
In other words, this is exposing a long standing flaw in journalism. I know things are super polarized now, but even 20 years ago, when mentioning a Congressperson regarding a particular social problem, they would specify if he was a Democrat/Republican.
I really don't need to know which party he is part of. If the article was about a party's stance, it makes sense - but the article is about one politician.
Sure you do, to understand actual patterns in actions of members of the party.
And ignoring that, it’s general context. Part of the job of a journalist.
> to understand actual patterns in actions of members of the party.
Or to construct patterns that don't reflect reality.
Should we also list their ages, ethnicity, religious affiliation(s) in each article mentioning a Congressperson and construct those patterns as well?
Sorry, I'd like to think on my own.
When every vote on a bill lands along party lines you might want to begin to suspect that party affiliation matters quite a bit.
> I know things are super polarized now, but even 20 years ago, when mentioning a Congressperson regarding a particular social problem, they would specify if he was a Democrat/Republican.
When articles always mention party affiliation, people will judge the politician's behavior based on the affiliation, and not on his actions.
I checked a few news websites and the only one I could find that did a halfway decent job of this was USA Today: https://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/
The World section seems to have a heavy bias towards news from the USA.
The UK section seems to have a heavy bias towards news from Scotland.
It looks too simplistic for me to actually use.
Several sections have Trump in the headline. I wish there was a way to block that word like I do in Lemmy. That guy monopolizes the headlines which only makes him more powerful, and annoys me. I'll see whether I can take this when I use this new app, which I otherwise think is great.
This comment[0] suggests that they have some kind of a filter
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45427513
We have Content Filter on the web version. And it's coming to the mobile app very soon. We're working towards having complete feature parity with the web app.
Strange, I couldn't find anything in the settings (iOS version). So maybe there's a divergent feature set and updates are forthcoming.
I can't speak to any of the apps, but after making my original comment, I checked out the website version, and the settings there do indeed have filters for category as well as specific terms.
Can verify. Settings > Content Filter > Custom Keywords. You can choose whether to hide the stories completely or blur them instead.
It is possible to block news by keywords, see settings (I believe in the web app currently only)
Awesome, looking forward to it being in the mobile apps if possible. I like to think of it as blocking spammy domains ;)
Haha if you block Politics, Sports, Celebrity News and Crypto there are no news in the USA section for me
Surely it isn't that simple. Even a person who thoroughly condemns Trump's hijacking of media systems and attentions must acknowledge that if international politics are at all relevant for you, some actions of the US president should be seen by you, if only in exceptional circumstances.
This is the issue. I feel bombarded by trump's firehouse of bullshit, but some of it has to be important, right? So how can Kagi create a "smart" trump filter that focuses on the most important stuff and reduces the firehose. I tried Kagi news and created a "trump" filter and *every story in the US section was gone*.
The problem is the continual stream of bullshit emitted from Trump's mouth gets clicks, and as such even little things that don't have any bearing on an international audience are reported heavily.
When Biden was president I barely heard anything about US politics, but with Trump in power it's hard to avoid.
The Belgian section has no french language articles, they still need to work some things out but I welcome the idea.
Haters gonna hate, but I just downloaded Kagi News and LOVE it. I want to QUICKLY see all the news headlines and drill deeper in as needed, and Kagi News seems to do exactly this.
I recommend Current Events from Wikipedia[1] for a neutral summary of the most important news in the world.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
I never found the lowest most common denominator news "curation" to be at all interesting, let alone algorithmically driven ones. The issue with news has nothing to do with curation of mainstream media. There is very little value in reading a state department or law enforcement press release summarized by some overworked stenographer/journalist. Or some NGO's push to drive some nondescript narrative uncritically parroted. Or some SEO driven click bait or tragedy porn.
If you wanted to fix the news you'd begin by critically curating mainstream news and throwing 80% of it in the trash, then you'd add 80% of material and critical analysis back to the 20% that had none of that.
I really like this!
I do wish I could have better control of what languages I'm getting. Right now the option is to either translate everything or nothing. I'd prefer news in their original, untranslated form if it's one of the 4 languages I speak, otherwise translate them to English.
I added the category "Israel" and everything was in Hebrew, so I had to set my language to English, but now news in my native Swedish are translated to English and I have to kind of translate it back in my head as I read them.
It's not the end of the world, but it seems like fairly low-hanging fruit!
That's weird. I set the language to English, but the stories in the Brazil category are still in Portuguese.
There are different settings for interface language and story language. Might it be that your story language is "default" (this appears to mean untranslated) and your interface language is set to English?
Yes, that is correct.
Do the checkmarks do anything? I expected them to disappear after a reload (like hiding a post on Hacker News), but apparently that's not what they're for.
"Mark as read" checks all the checkmarks, but since they're still there after a reload, I don't see the point.
The really weird thing to me is that the check marks don't persist across categories. I.e. I marked the story about Youtube as "read" in the "World" tab, but it doesn't get a check in the "USA" tab. Seems like the feature is pretty half baked.
It automatically marks stuff you've seen - it's just a visual cue. Similar to how search engines (like Google) show visited links with a different color.
I think keeping them on the page instead of automatically hiding them makes more sense for a product that's trying to update their news feed once per day. You feel more in control, as if it's not a stream of never-ending stories, but rather a fixed amount of stories that you can realistically power through. Seeing all items checked sort-of supports this philosophy.
For me, this is fairly useless because it mostly displays stories I've already seen elsewhere.
A news site has to display some uncommon stories to have any appeal.
Pretty nice so far. I enjoy the very visible categories (as in the "astronomy" label in the Science category, not the science, technology, etc ones) that make it easy to see if an article is relevant to my interests at a glance.
A save feature to keep track of interesting articles would be nice.
Having more news (or more filtered for quality) would also be nice. Right now at 12 the lists seem to be mostly taken up by trendy low-quality news that will be irrelevant and less news that doesn't make waves but will probably have more impact in the long run. Actually this might just be a lack of the number of places being scraped. Not an actual example from the site but consider how much an article of someone saying the latest comet is actually alien technology trends (but is completely irrelevant) vs a scientific paper reporting on the measurements of the atmospheric composition of a bunch of exoplanets.
Not the news I need. I need local news. I care about my local mayer race. I care what my school board does. I care about the local art studio events. unless you are my neighbor you don't care about my community (you have your own).
If you live in big city beware that your newspaper probably is lacking your neighborhood coverage which is what you need.
Add those to list of sources Kagi News uses and create a new category and it will show up even if you are the only user of it.
https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public
You miss the real problem: what I need doesn't exist. My local big city newspaper doesn't normally send reporters to the local things I care about. They paste the meeting minutes of the city consul meeting, but those are "debated a proposal from some business, voted, then passed" - what was the proposals, what points were debated, who votes which way (if they can tell). I need this information because in a month there is an election and I want to know who to vote for/against, but without going to the meetings I don't know who is worth voting for. (these meetings are the same night as the school board, and other city meetings so it isn't even possible for me to attend them all even if I didn't have other things I also need/want to do in life)
How can Kagi help?
I don't think they can. What we need are boots on the ground in each community. That means money to pay a lot of reporters. Which isn't compatible with a "Free (gratis) news" world. Even with ad supported news it is hard to get enough money to pay the people needed. And then we have to ask about bias - I wouldn't support a lot of reporters because they misrepresent my views politically in various ways.
It is a hard problem.
Kagi, I'm willing to pay if you hire people to fact check the generated articles. Or maybe have the community fact check and visually distinguish checked sentences from unchecked sentences.
Or just let an advanced model do extended research on each article
This is awesome. Only thing that is missing is a place for me to ask a question from Kagi Assistant about the current story I am looking at, using the story as part of the context of my question.
Nice to see an approach to reduce doomscrolling (for myself, and most of my bubble, the biggest addiction, impacting productivity, mental health, and neck).
Yet, there is Hacker Newsletter (https://hackernewsletter.com/, which I like and use), there are others pointed by GPT5 that I don't Mailbrew and Digest. Kagi looks like the true former.
What I do want is personalization - not by picking interest, but actual personality, prompt, tastes, good enough that it puts something other, rather than only narrowing and narrowing my view. Yet high quality, rather than clickbaits and other "fluff". Otherwise, following a few Reddits would do the job (with some API to send emails).
What I would like even more is something that actually turns my social media into daily emails.
There is almost no good reason to keep up with current events in a "news feed" style. I'd maybe like a feed that has a 1 month window summarizing any news cycle that survived 3 days. If it came and went in one cycle, then just don't bother about it. Most of the news is just propaganda anyway. I suppose it's wise to have a sense of the "current thing" so you don't put your foot in it with colleagues who are inhabiting a tighter timeline than you are, but other than that there doesn't seem to be many use cases for keeping tabs in a news feed. Maybe if you're in the business of disrupting/reinforcing people's OODA loops you might need to know some of this stuff, but otherwise it's just a self-own to keep up with the news.
I wish there was a way to look at a previous day's news. I can't seem to find any buttons/UI that lets you look at news from any day but today.
We've Time Travel feature coming soon to both the web and mobile apps. It'll allow you to browse the stories from any date since we started aggregating news ;)
That's a good idea. If they implement it, I would however suggest putting a limit on to it - perhaps only let you see the news within the last week/month.
This seems to go against the principle of the product (see endless scroll)
If you missed a day of news, whatever was really important will re-surface in today's news (major world incident)
Otherwise, perhaps what was missed is noise!
The grounding is really strange.
This example includes a Reddit post as a source:
https://kite.kagi.com/s/hjgy55
But that post is actually a link to reuters.com
There is also a list of "citations" which are referenced from the generated text, and "sources" which are not referenced anywhere. It's not clear if they used reddit or reuters to generate any of the text.
I also see lots of citations to "common knowledge"... which is um, weird.
For example:
> National Guard activation: Guard forces can serve under state control (Title 32) or be federalized (Title 10), which determines who directs missions and the scope of authority [*].
Is this common knowledge?
Hey - Reddit is included as a source because posts can contain firsthand accounts and independent analysis. The RSS feed we use from Reddit provides the post title and text. So to answer your question, when you see Reddit as a source we are using the aforementioned data, not what it links to.
About "common knowledge" sources - we validate all content for accuracy. When the LLM needs to add context that's missing from sources (e.g. historical background), we mark these as "common knowledge" since this generated content can't be validated against the original sources. You're right that your example isn't common knowledge at all, we'll work on adding actual sources for these claims too.
Thanks for trying it out!
If the content can't be grounded then it should be dropped.
Something similar that collects news from various sources, plus it adds social media context: https://truenorthnews.app/
Link to iOS App: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-news/id6748314243
Every single news aggregation services promises the same "signal over noise" and "just the facts". I'm so numb from hearing that, that I don't believe it anymore.
I do however like the fact that Kagi only pushes _once_ a day. Drinking from the firehose is physically and mentally exhausting. Even daily feels like too much these days other than a quick check to make sure the world didn't implode or the Rapture happened while I was busy trying to get CC to behave.
Very skeptical that this would work for me. None of the topics that Kagi chooses to "cover" in their seven or so stories for the day resonates with what I'd want to read. That's exactly why we have feeds that you can tune to your tastes and so on. Getting rid of endless scrolling and such might be a good thing though.
I'm not affiliated, but I've used https://www.memeorandum.com/ for more than a decade.
Gives me a good high-level view of the news. I'm a Kagi customer and I definitely don't want anything they do with the news.
Gabe Rivera has been doing that right for almost 20 years.
If you haven't seen it there's also an amazing feature that you can go back and see the homepage as it was from any point in time in the last 20 years
This is it. This the one. How have I never heard of this and its related services? It looks perfect. Your own blog is interesting too.
> I'm a Kagi customer and I definitely don't want anything they do with the news.
Can you expand on why?
It's not their lane. There are other solutions that exist which are fine. Maybe I was too quick to judge, I don't know. Maybe I'll be surprised in a good way.
Can anyone in here explain why there are so many vague "I don't trust Kagi" comments in here? I don't know who they are. And, I haven't seen anyone expand on why.
Kagi solves web search for now. LLMs are incapable of determining what’s important. They are excellent at determining what’s common. That doesn’t connect with news summarization in the way we’d ideally want it to unfortunately. I don’t care for low fidelity news.
Thanks for providing RSS feeds for Kagi -- just added them all to https://usedigest.com so users can use this as a drop-in replacement for their news instead of adding various RSS feeds from other news outlets.
Between this app (kagi) and the Harmony hacknernews client, I'm super happy if this is my only content consumption on the internet/smartphone. The kagi app just needs a black/oled theme please, and can we bump the aricles from 12 to 20 or 30? 12 is just a tiny bit shy.
One of the best news sites (still running) that I use frequently is http://68k.news/ - it's sort of like this minus the AI summary and info part of the article.
It's just plain text web 1.0 page that uses some ranking algo to figure out the top stores of a given day across categories, and shows that headline and under it similar headlines across different news sources.
It used to pull in RSS from the sources so you could also read the articles in plaintext, but that broke a bit ago and the dev hasn't fixed it.
Regardless, I still find it a great site to quickly get up to speed on top stories of the day!
But also I really like (and pay for!) Kagi so happily support their own effort here.
As a paying customer of kagi (family account) it saddens me to see my money spent this way.
As a paying customer of Kagi (family account), I'm delighted to see them spend my money in a way that seems utterly compatible with their history of making the web pleasant to use again.
Feedback (if someone reads it): offer an option to translate everything to English. For example, news from/about Russia are in Russian, and thus I can't meaningfully share them to non-Russians.
That's despite the appropriate HTTP header:
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Hey, thanks patrakov for trying the app! Users can actually change the content language of the app from Settings. All stories will be automatically translated to their preferred language.
When you share a Russian story with a non-russian speaker, they will still be able to read the story in their own set Content Language in the Settings. We're working on improving the UX of language, sharing a story, and more.
I think other people mentioned it already, but ideally I'd like to choose a list of languages to leave them as is, and translate the rest.
For example, I can speak Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese and English. Ideally I would want news in those languages to keep their original text, while translating news in other languages to a target language.
For example, if I set my language as English, Russian news would get translated to English, but Portuguese ones would keep their original text.
Happy paying Kagi subscriber here. Rock on, Kagi.
I really like this, and I say this as an AI skeptic. It's a good summary of news and looks quite neutral -- good enough for me to skim the headlines and then dig deeper if I need to.
Is there anythong in the "backend" pre-ai, data scraping etc that is open and decentralized that people could use?
It feels to me like the bigger problem is more about assembling time series of "news" not "news today".
Like if you wanted "show me all stories about crime X from the BBC since 1980" or whatever but then you want to do this across many sources.
This is the missing piece for most new analytics. I think there are legal blockers to getting this done and why I mention decentralization.
Awesome, i like it a lot!
Some UX friction i noticed: To get back to the homepage from an article, i have to click on the article headline. While this is elegant and you likely get used to it, once you know it, it's not exactly intuitive.
Looks pretty good at first sight.
However, I set my feed up on the web app, seeing that it should sync on "all my devices".
Next, I installed the Android app, and mybe I missed something, but I don't see any way to connect to my Kagi account.
So much for syncing...
Thanks for the feedback, it's on our list.
I AM using it for a long time, its brilliant but as any ai can hallucinate. Joining 4 separate technical topics about 4 different companies and initiatives is funny but misleading. Wont go back though - HN+Kite is all I do.
Funny coincidence. This morning, my news aggregator delivered its daily results. The stack:
Mind sharing that feeds and 200 line code? Thank you
I prefer to not. LLM prompts and feeds selection clearly expose my political preferences, interests, and location. And this is research project for more serious task. For 200 lines of code, there are 1000+ for evaluation, automatic prompt optimization. But idea is simple, so there should be no problem to implement it
No worries here.
When they started developing this they were looking for a Flutter developer. Here is my code challenge submission, in case any one is curious about what it would look like as a Flutter project: https://github.com/SpeerJ/Kite-Code-Challenge-for-Kagi
I had a little trouble imagining myself using this in particular but I'm a big fan of the search engine.
Mini feedback - it appears to report google news results as if from google and not the website in question (Wired in my case, the snapdragon x2 elite article).
Apart from that, it's really nice! Good job, kagi team!
Nice idea, I’ve been toying around the idea of consuming news only once per day. But for me I think I want an actual newspaper with in depth articles rather than short news posts from online news.
I think a fundamental issue with news is that it doesn't try to push people to have a more correct mental model of the world.
Some things that could change that:
- Deep fact checking. Community Notes on twitter do a better job at this than any other system I've seen. The reason it doesn't really work in practice is that the stream of misinformation and confusion is orders of magnitude larger than the Community Notes community. A news app should not have that scalability issue.
- Follow up. If I read something that later turns out to be false I need to be notified of that. This unfortunately requires that the app track what I have read.
- Context. If you have a news article about a stabbing, it sounds like stabbings are up. The context that they are going up or down statistically is extremely relevant. The lack of context can turn a tiny truth into a bigger lie.
- Deep confusion analysis. Figuring out where people are confused statistically and focusing on trying to manage that misinformation gap is not something that is dealt with at all. I would like to become LESS confused by information sources not more.
That's just media literacy I think. I would add to that "Sourcing": if the article just parrots some press release or badly summarizes some paper, it should at least link to that but they rarely do. Then it is hard to find the primary source, because you'll only find articles about it, not the actual primary source that they bury in google search.
> That's just media literacy I think
The word "just" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there.
Systems can change. Human brains on a population/genetic level can't. Blaming individual humans when we know statistically what they will do is mathematically equivalent to giving up.
Also, giving someone information that turns out to be false and never following up isn't "media literacy". I can't see how it can possibly be.
Absolutely, this is just what came to my mind when reading your suggestions. I meant media literacy teaches a lot of methodology that would naturally lead to your suggestions, that's all.
> Systems can change. Human brains on a population/genetic level can't.
Realistically we can't fix media literacy education and we can't fix journalism, both are systemically broken. But I would never blame people, everyone is the product of their environment and a victim of the system.
> Also, giving someone information that turns out to be false and never following up isn't "media literacy". I can't see how it can possibly be.
Media literacy in that context would just refer to reliable sourcing, reliable sources post retractions/corrections.
> Realistically we can't fix media literacy education and we can't fix journalism, both are systemically broken. But I would never blame people, everyone is the product of their environment and a victim of the system.
I think it's a lot more reasonable to expect change journalism. Or maybe not journalism per se, but information dissemination/world model updates. News/journalism is just the form we've sort of settled on for that kind of job, but it's fundamentally the wrong thing. It's like asking for a faster horse when we want a car. Or asking for email notifications when we really want is a way to know the current status of something.
> Media literacy in that context would just refer to reliable sourcing, reliable sources post retractions/corrections.
I think the reach of those corrections is as much a problem as if they are published. Posting retractions to a printer that is directly hooked up to a shredder is technically "posting retractions", but practically it's not. Same as most news sources really. The retractions are functionally buried for almost all sources, including the most prestigious source Nature.
> Or maybe not journalism per se, but information dissemination/world model updates. News/journalism is just the form we've sort of settled on for that kind of job, but it's fundamentally the wrong thing.
There is no particular reason to assume journalism has a future at all, why rely on a journalists biased summary of a press release and biased editorial teams prioritization of what's important. It increasingly discredits itself, with smaller concentrated ownership and blatant biased reporting (see Iraq war, Gaza genocide). Then the centralization makes it vulnerable to external malicious attacks (see Gawker). But there are so many parts that are hard to replace, credible reporting on current events and investigative journalism, that requires resources mostly only present in large organizations like the visual investigations team at the nyt. It's broken but hard to replace, especially making it decentralized.
But anyway, kagi news does nothing.
>News is broken. We all know it, but we’ve somehow accepted it as inevitable.
News is broken because journalism is no longer a viable career path. No amount of RSS aggregators will fix that.
[dead]
In France (and maybe other countries) this is kind of what Courrier International [0] does but with humans curating and translating articles from around the world, and human-written summaries articles from multiple sources. It's in the same holding as Le Monde.
[0] https://courrierinternational.com
Just plugging my service, https://mosaique.info/. It only uses an LLM to generate a short summary, and other ML algorithms structure the information (comments from officials and experts, classification...).
I'm currently working on a major overhaul to provide more holistic context around news by better surfacing less-discussed events.
I’ve been using this for a few days now. I stumbled across it in the App Store last week.
I hoping this can fill a gap for me currently. I want something that will give me broad awareness of big news I should probably know about, that’s not a 24 hour firehose of news.
I like the once-per-day update and the relatively short list of stories. The jury is still out on how sticky it will be, in terms of being my go-to place for a daily update.
The Economist's 'World in Brief' might appeal:
https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief
Looks like a decentralize and locally hosted version of https://particle.news
My thoughts too! Strange that got much less traction when the app was posted half a year ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43698590
I'd like to pay Kagi if I can submit my feeds and the insights from them, as I see from the portal now it's not that interesting...
One thing I found working on a startup which touched on the political sphere is people don't want curated lists imposed on them, they want to impose their curated lists on other people.
I like that it only provides the list once a day (I do think that's a clever feature), but the inability to influence bias seems like a mistake, especially since the sources already seem to follow a bias.
"Community-driven sources: Our news sources are open source and community-curated through our public GitHub repository. Anyone can propose additions, flag problems, or suggest improvements."
This sounds like it's going to be a massive headache. Activists with nothing to do all day will be all over this, for their chance to try to have influence over what other people read.
Is not the purpose of Kagi that it isn't like Google/Bing excessively buying into LLM hype? I just want an independent sustainable search engine, that's all.
I really like the balance here. No "brand names" in the headline summaries, no imagery or videos on the homepage, summarize multiple sources. It's daily so no need to refresh.
I've been really enjoying Semafor's emails too, but their 2x a day is tough for me to keep up with. I'll try to get a habit of looking at Kagi News to stay informed.
I like 1440 (https://join1440.com) for this. Once a day daily email digest. I like the email format because I'm less likely to start clicking around compared to a web site, and it doesn't require a separate app.
I think it is human curated, but I'm not positive about that.
I love everything that Kagi has put out. The Orion browser rocks (recently replaced Brave, good riddance) and my go-to chatbot today is the Kagi Assistant with Kimi K2 connected to the internet.
I tended towards Axios but lately it's gotten a bit paywalled and less informative. Can't wait to incorporate Kagi News into my daily workflow.
I've been using Kagi for 2 months and has some very positive experiences with it. Nowadays I don't use search heavily but it's still nice to have alternatives like Kagi search.
The news feature feels a bit underwhelming and underdeveloped though, especially with the LLM/AI approach.
I’m probably online too much, but a lot of the news I see is from yesterday. Supposedly it just refreshed with today’s news, but does that really clear out anything older if some outlets publish their stories later than others? I would not describe some of this as "today's headlines"
You might be online too much if you don't consider something that happened yesterday to be news.
An attitude of "Hook me up to the novelty juice, this is old weak sauce", is a sign of internet / news addiction.
I don't need the latest news. I would just like to know if something published happened yesterday or today at a glance.
I've been using Kagi search for a while now and frankly it's fantastic. Google looks like AOL to me now.
These guys are doing great work and this news product is exactly what I want... Once a day hit. What is happening in the world? As far as pmf goes they hit the mark for an old fart like me.
Nice, but navigation is awful. After reading a story, the back button doesn't take you back to the table of contents.
(Edit) Now I see. You have to scroll through the story and click "Close story" to get back. It's "mobile first".
Given that this news is generated I have no idea why the default would be to be in the native language of the sources. And if that makes any sense I would need to be able to select multiple languages I want to read in because I can’t read all languages.
Kagi, please, please, please don't fall into the Mozilla trap and waste your time creating a whole bunch of useless side projects that never succeed, to the detriment of the one thing that we all need you to do.
You have a great search service. Please focus on that. Build that into an actual Google-beater. Provide the features your customers actually want. Spend your time, money, and energy making that the greatest search service possible.
Don't waste this opportunity. Please.
Unlike Mozilla's browser, I'd like to believe that our search engine is getting better with each update?
Mozilla fell into this trap as its business model was fundamentally broken (majority revenue coming from biggest compatitor). Our business model is healthy and the more apps we have in the ecosystem the stronger the ecosystem gets.
> the more apps we have in the ecosystem the stronger the ecosystem gets
that only works if the apps somehow reinforce each other, and spending time developing one app also adds something to the other apps. I'm not sure that's true here. I don't see how an LLM-based news service makes your search service stronger?
They do - Kagi News, Summarize and Translate all contribute back to the ecosystem and are getting integrated cross-product. We are in the business of information consumption and consuming news is one of the fundemental use cases. Having our own pipleine for this is beneficial long term.
I don't understand this trend of translating UI elements when 100% of the content is English. Who does that help?
I really like this for practising a foreign language by switching the content language. I do agree with other comments here though that it will need greater control over which languages are translated.
i'm doing something like this, summarizing HN posts because most of the time when there's hundreds or thousands of comments, it's not possible to read everything and i feel like i'm missing something.
So far, i quite enjoy having a summary with bullet points.
For example, here's the summary of this discussion: https://extraakt.com/extraakts/kagi-s-daily-news-ritual-spar...
It actually seems nice. I realize Reddit is not a news source but it used to be a great way to see current events and get level-headed takes on those events. This approach could be a better non-biased* alternative.
* for now
I don't understand how this is 100% free, no subscriptions, no purchase, apparently no ads or tracking and yet I'm also the "customer" and not the product. What's the catch?
It seems fairly low effort (from a cost perspective) to deploy and maintain this feature, so I think it's a great way to get the Kagi name out there, which may perhaps lead to a few new users!
Sort of like a loss leader, eg the Costco hot dog :-)
Correct and down the road I can see a premium version of this being a thing.
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There is a more fundamental problem here. The news feeds are going in this direction for a reason. I don't think you addressed that reason.
You have defined the desirable news as "pure, essential information". What's that again? How do you know what's pure and essential info for any user? The traditional news media had started there, with that pure news, and ended up here where they are today.
Ultimately, you will realize that your content need to grab attention enough so that people consume your feed. People's attention goes to where things look weird, exciting, sensational, emotional, trivia, gossip etc. You can't do away with all that and just dish out the pure and essential info. It didn't work. People tried it.
Is this an annoucement or just a promotion?
Bunch of discussion here 3 months ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44518473
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44519356
It was in beta then.
Judging by the newly available categories it looks like they may have paid attention to some early feedback :)
After poking around for half an hour or so, I think I'm going back to ground news :) . I love most kagi products but this one is going to need some more love I think.
Looks great for general content. Love that it offers translation.
But the Sports section is bad. The game finished 10 hours ago and it's still showing a match preview.
It's generated once a day. Which I love.
It still has the US government shutdown hasn't happened yet. It's really hard to call this news.
You should check that awkward thing called newspapers, it will blow your mind :)
It's funny how awkward the French version is.
- Parquet de Paris ouvre 24 enquêtes pour menaces
- Update: famille et experte ADN au procès Jubillar
- Intersyndicale appelle à la grève du 2 octobre
This won't be used by French speakers as is.
After each headline on the page with all the tabs, there is an unlabeled button after each headline. Please, Kagi I beg of you, don't overextend yourselves.
This rocks. I'm gonna start looking at it instead of NYTimes.
This but let me choose over what period I want news summarised. Daily is too often, even week is (at least to me).
Let me open the app once a month and see a summary of what has happened over it.
This defiantly doesn't do exactly what you want, but you might enjoy Delayed Gratification at https://www.slow-journalism.com/
Will give it a go. Thanks!
As a Kagi Ultimate subscriber with a Family Plan and a separate subscription for Orion+, I've got to say, I don't see the point of this.
RSS works great and there are a million ways to consume them. There are also a myriad New aggregator offerings, most with some sort of LLM thrown in on top.
Did we really need this? Was there nothing better Kagi could dedicate its resources to?
Thank you for your support. What I will say will sound a bit selfish - but I needed this and it happened. More details in my relationship with news in the first two articles linked at https://kite.kagi.com/about
To be fair this is exactly how Kagi Search happened too - many people didn't see a point in a paid search engine in 2018 too, but I and my family needed one and it happened.
really nice, I was looking for something like this yesterday and now I see this. It would be nice to see these aggregators try to format these stories like a newspaper though instead of just a list of rss feeds under different categories. if it's already curated you may as well make it pretty too and make me feel smart as if im reading an actual newspaper
It's good. And always happy to see SvelteKit in action.
The (apparently) unchangeable categories of “US” and “World” is extremely irritating to me. May I suggest you at least categorise by continent?
Feels good to be free from Google, even if it costs money.
"Indonesia school collapse leaves 38 missing, 77 hurt" is categorized as "Disaster". I cannot see where to disable this category.
I'd like to install and try this, but I don't use Google Play and it's not in F-Droid. Wish they'd just make an APK available.
Thanks for the feedback, we are looking into providing the app without any Play services dependencies.
Same here, the website seems to be working fine on mobile tho
I really like the once-a-day updates, makes it so that I can drop in and check on the news but not constantly refreshing for updates.
Any payments to journalists and news sites?
As much as i hate modern news sites and our ad riddled culture, its pretty hard to ignore that this tool couldn't exist without the articles that those same news sites are creating. 100 years ago, imagine a service that just took all newspapers and summarized them like this somehow, and everyone knew they had no actual writers but just an advanced printer that could merge articles or some goofy w/e.
can't imagine it would go over well in the court system.
I think the deeper problem is the quality of the source, less so than the curation of the sources.
I would love to replace google/apple news, but publishing once daily doesn't work for me.
Why not? Is it really that important for you to know of events a few hours earlier?
Nextcloud News works just fine, is free, is as biased as the feeds you configure and no more, does not (yet...) introduce/intrude LLM slop, is free software (beer/freedom) and has been around for a long long time. You can configure it any way you want, the default update interval is 5 minutes which should be enough for even the most FOMO-affected 'news' junkie. Of course the actual updates depend on the RSS sources but if you configure a number of active feeds you'll get updates every few minutes.
https://github.com/nextcloud/news
This looks awesome, but there's absolutely no way I'm installing an app for this, sorry.
So don't! kite.kagi.com.
Cool idea. I just installed the app and it seems quite well-engineered! However, here are a few things I'd love to see improved:
- Allow me to have a single feed (as opposed to one tab/feed per category). Also, to prevent that feed from becoming too long, allow me to set a maximum number of news items or maximum number of minutes I'd like to spend. Prioritize/leave out news items accordingly. In other words: While I might be interested in sports, I'm not interested in reading or scrolling through as many news items about sports as about, say, world politics.
- "Highlights" and "perspectives" below the article text read like useless AI slop that merely reiterates the text, and artificially prolong an otherwise neatly concise page.
- Allow me to intersect categories and/or choose a regional "focus". Non-regional categories like "sports", "business", "technology" currently seem to aggregate news from across the world. However, I might be particularly¹ interested in a regional subset of e.g. business or sports news.
¹) I.e. not exclusively so. I'm still interested in world news but only when it comes to major events (in the sports case, say, world cups and championships).
I find Kagi somewhat perplexing with this release. On one hand, the search engine is clearly good at surfacing content that isn't AI slop, and it has initiatives like the "small web" that endeavor to surface smaller websites. Instead of doing something similar, it's just an AI summary engine. I find it not only contradictory of many of their other efforts, but also unasked for. I would love to see something similar to "small web" for news.
Because Google news was such a great idea. I’m enjoying Kagi but this isn’t it.
I'm biased because I build my own RSS reader[0] and I feel that with this approach the thing I love the most about RSS, to follow small niche sources gets lost. That said, I think for big news it could be great.
[0] https://ivyreader.com
I liked Kagi, was paying for it for a few months, but $10 is just too much
I don't find it too much. For $10 I get a search engine better than all the others, I get access to many AI models via Kagi Assistant and Kagi Translate.
While I understand different people find value in different things, dismissing Kagi generally as "too expensive" is ignorant IMO.
I think it also depends what you use it for. I use both their search and their AI models for software development and it saves me precious time when looking for information - in a way it pays for itself.
I also used it for software engineering and personal use as well.
I had two major issues with it:
- it wasn't as snappy as google, but I kind of got used to it
- I wasn't trusting it (if that makes sense) and was falling back !g to make sure everything was searched
For $10, I expect to get a premium service, not a just good enough one.
I have to admit that I liked the idea, feeling of privacy and the ability to tailor a search engine for my needs.
Unfortunatelly I think that they are not where they need to be for the $10 pricing plan.
I get by with the $5 plan. I don't use it at work, and it shows. I often curse during work that I can't exclude certain domains permanently from my Google search!
Is the future where we pay a premium for human generated content?
When I filter on Kirk, I get No Results Found - seems legit.
If you read the post, you would learn that it only reports on news from the same day.
Please don't comment on whether someone read an article. "Did you even read the article? It mentions that" can be shortened to "The article mentions that".[1]
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
The UI looks neat, can't wait to try this out
Cool but how does it compare to something like subreddits? There are still biased moderators behind the scene just like subreddits. Seems to not have the upvoting/downvoting side of it which imo is crucial to democratize the entire thing.
I think upvoting/downvoting is a crucial aspect to news/information/knowledge. But we've been doing it with just numbers all along. Why not experiment with weights or more complex voting methods? Ex: my reputation is divided in categories - I'm more an expert in history then politics hence my vote towards historical subjects have more weights. Feels like that's the next big step for news. Instead of just another centralized aggregator?
No offense to the cool system and website though
that "Kagi News" is at the top of "Hacker News" speaks volumes about the state of the "hacker"
HN has never really been for or about hackers.
one quick little usability thing, clicking the logo on the web version doesn't bring me back to the main page
Similar to ground.news or thenewpaper.co ?
I LOVE this. The app feels very clean, the data's presented beautifully, and it hasn't been enshittified yet. And hopefully never will, because I pay Kagi in hopes that they don't.
I feel this is what Apple News should've been. Instead it's just god-awful ad-filled mess of news articles. And the only reason I have it is because of Apple One. But it is a clearly neglected product.
I also pay for ground news but it hasn't met my expectations, mostly because there's a lot of redundancy with wire stories. Like it'll show 50 sources but they're all just regurgitating the same AP or Reuters article. So it skews the "bias"
What is the business model / exit strategy for Kagi's founders and investors? What is the news curation process and its relation to the public interest?
Are these articulated in a manner which gives stakeholders (investors, users, and staff) assurances and standing?
...
What are competitors and collaborators in this space? Semafor seems to have a similar product, what are the differentiators and/or collaboration opportunities?
...
Netflix was subscription only, till it was "pay to get rid of ads". Then there is the whole business of profiling customer interest, etc.
We have product labeling for food, why not web services?
Read the "About" section of the page.
And just like Netflix, if kagi turns into paid Google I'll cancel my subscription.
IDK what their future plans are, but there current plans work well for me as a consumer.
This is honestly very disappointing. Not using LLMs, but the complete lack of transparency about their usage. You can already see in the repository issues related to hallucinations[^1]. This is _fine_, but not if you seem to obscure the fact that these can be very, very wrong. This seems to only be mentioned in the very brief loading screen and at the bottom of the about page[^2]. Also, apparently many of the "core RSS feeds" are just... reddit[^3]???
For me, this is only useful as a curated list of news feeds (and subreddits I guess), but nothing more.
[1]: https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/issues/97#issuecom...
[2]: https://kite.kagi.com/about
[3]: https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public/blob/main/core_fee...
Ive stopped using all kagi stuff because of the lack in transparency and my official requests for transparency remained unanswered. I don't trust any American corporation that refuses to be transparent. US law allows for way to much dangerous stuff compared to the EU. That is also why the US lost its democracy recently.
Don't want to sound too contrarian, but I feel like having LLMs involved with the process of disseminating news is a bit dystopian.
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I doubt anything comes close to Perplexity News at the moment, its truly amazing.
sites like these make me realize that i’m not all that interested in “news”, which might be a personal fault, but also makes you wonder what all the other “”news”” sites have been doing to capture my attention...
love love love how it doesn't infinite scroll!!!
Another one you can check out is one I have made for myself and used by friends [1], although only tech news. It also uses more than 100 RSS feeds to aggregate the top 10 news every few hours. Also has tags that can be used to read topic related news.
[1] https://embit.ca
I'm just happy to be able to entirely remove topics like sports. Google News no longer lets you do this, and gleefully pushes topics on me even when I religiously press "Show fewer stories like this"; it is infuriating. No I do not care about celebrities or football; stop insisting that I do!
Nice design. I like the "today in history" feature
Lately I've been working toward less app time and more boredom https://youtu.be/orQKfIXMiA8?si=ZyvxO0SFjoGGHbdK ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ works wonders
Ground offers a paid service that summarizes a broad range of sources and intentionally helps you escape your filter bubble, https://ground.news/.
I'm just waiting for whatever shady practice or controversy behind this infinite YouTube sponsorship is to finally come out like all the others have.
or you could read the new york times
Looks like yet another aggregator that will send almost no referral traffic to the folks who actually put labor into writing.
Parasitic by definition.
And embracing the news from nowhere perspective.
So both a parasite and boring at the same time.
I wish more tech folks who want to "fix the news" would learn from Gabe Rivera's Techmeme, Memeorandum, and Mediagazer.
He's done aggregation right for 20 years
Exactly. I also wonder what the end game is. If creating content becomes a loss-making exercise, people will logically stop and the LLMs will have less and less to content to 'train on.' And as even large news corps are increasingly deploying internal LLMs, the deadening banal style of LLMs, A.I. over-view etc will inevitably drive readers away. I use Perplexity for search in place of Google and it surfaces good links most of the time. But what do tech and media companies - even spotify - think they will do when the artists, reporters and creatives stop feeding them? Or readers don't want to read banal summaries of everything?
It uses RSS from the folks who actually put labor into writing and links to the sources under every article.
I love Kagi!
If I was giving my money to Kagi I'd be mad that they invest it in bullshit side products like this instead of search.
It seems like all their recent releases are just following into the AI hype.
Yeah, as a paying customer it is annoying that my money is being used to fuel AI hype instead of to get me off of it.
Trump just said we should use the military on American cities...and it's not reported in Kagi news. That's a showstopper for me.
When? It’s updated once daily and afaik he’s been doing that for months hasn’t he?
It happened this morning at the military gathering: https://www.reuters.com/world/us/trump-preside-over-unusual-...
Here's the Kagi article which potentially could have mentioned this: https://kite.kagi.com/s/8b5ta4
It's unclear to me if any of the source material reported this when the summary was generated, especially since the source articles may have been updated throughout the day.
Ridiculous... I mean do these people ever use the things they release? They totally miss the point.
Am I the only one thinking that "Cagey News" sounds like anti-marketing?
This doesn’t really seem to touch on the problem I have with news, which is that it is all doom and gloom, FUD and outrage. The headlines I saw:
Trump, Congress deadlock as shutdown deadline nears
Taliban cuts internet nationwide, flights grounded in Afghanistan
Indonesia school collapse leaves 38 missing, 77 hurt
YouTube settles Trump suspension lawsuit for $24.5m
German court jails AfD aide for China spying
US deports 120 Iranians after deal
Russian drone strike kills family of four
Is this really what I need to know in the world? Am I saying “informed”? This is not helping the anxiety from reading news described in the article. This is not good for people.
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Another russian disinfo laundering service.
This aspect matters and there is little comment here on this (other threads on Kagi have raised it).
Kagi’s ‘neutral’ stance on politics, their association with Yandex/the Russian state mean this will be interesting to watch.
It’s by far the best search I’ve ever used.
https://old.reddit.com/r/ukraine/comments/1gvcqua/psa_the_ka...
IIUC, the basis for this claim is that Kagi pays Yandex (a Russian search company) for access to Yandex's image search API. Is that the entirety of their link to Russia? If so, it seems like a stretch to accuse them of being a "Russian disinfo laundering service" (GP's words, not yours), but this is my first time hearing this, so if I'm missing something, I'm all ears.
You haven't been missing much. Just have been very sad to give up the best search after receiving that nice yellow t-shirt of theirs and not given even an option to opt out from Yandex. But war is war and even more so when its on your doorsteps. Sad story, is all.
Makes total sense. Please don't take my comment as a defense of Russia. I can understand not wanting any of your money flowing into the Russian economy, especially with Russian violence so close to home.
The opt out bit would solve it for me too.
How did this get so many upvotes? Did I wake up in 2004?
If you don't need/like links there is https://rawdiary.com/
RSS is a strange choice in 2025. As a search engine they are in the position to extract things from web pages themselves. They already need this capability in order to properly rank the page.
For one, I welcome RSS (back) and say the more, the better. I much prefer to pull specific types of information at my own set intervals when I need them, instead of either having undifferentiated information pushed on me continuously like a blast from a fire hose, or having to reach out to manually check and filter many individual sources. The idea is to schedule my receipt and processing of the information, and then refine the stream itself as well as the intervals I use to view it and the total amount of time I spend on it.
I'm currently on the hunt for an RSS reader that has good filtering and sorting functionality, so I can (for instance) pull several feeds from only certain sources, but not see any posts/articles about terms A or B, yet see and sort any posts with term C by time, followed by either posts from source 1 with terms C and D, or posts from source 2 with terms E or F but not G, which would be sorted by relevance.
I know that's a complicated and probably poorly written explanation; but I'm imagining something like Apple Mail Rules for RSS.
I think Kagi's target audience is people who want to see news, and not people who want a RSS reader for news. The average person does not care how news gets to them. The fact that it uses RSS is a technical detail they should not have to worry about. Kagi should not be artificially restricting themselves to RSS feed when there is news that exists outside the RSS ecosystem which they should consider including.
Kagi's eventual target audience might be the average person, but right now its customers are almost certainly the type of people who mourned the shuttering of Google Reader.
Why? I do use it and can't imagine following anything without it... And I keep hoping that it will come back and replace absolutely terrible schizophrenic feeds from meta/x/etc
>Why?
Because not every site has a RSS feed. For example when Claude Sonnet 4.5 released it would make sense to have that, but there is no RSS feed for Anthropic. Being compatible with the entire web instead of just a subset of it is useful.
Well... thanks to walled-garden policy from google whole web decided to erect walls instead of providing neat RSS. Though all websites I care about have RSS and if some doesn't I contact the admin and they add it…
I don't know of any major publisher that doesn't maintain RSS feeds, and this is mostly syndicating major publishers, so I'm not sure it makes any difference
I use RSS to get my information and I've built my own reader https://rahuldshetty.github.io/reader-project/ for it. It helps me stay upto date with my various news feed and sites at one place. I don't have to search for things in search engine all the time for a piece of news.