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."
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.
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
> 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.
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 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.
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.
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).
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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!
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 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 :(
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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’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 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'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.
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'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 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 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.
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.
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.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
__jonas|5 months ago
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'.
Harmon758|5 months ago
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."
coffeefirst|5 months ago
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.
mvieira38|5 months ago
whatamidoingyo|5 months ago
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.
atonse|5 months ago
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.
jama211|5 months ago
imiric|5 months ago
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.
zwnow|5 months ago
BeetleB|5 months ago
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).
kiicia|5 months ago
kace91|5 months ago
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 (?)
viraptor|5 months ago
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.
j2kun|5 months ago
> 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.
devmor|5 months ago
That’s not news. That’s news-adjacent random slop.
Onavo|5 months ago
ivape|5 months ago
mediumsmart|5 months ago
bigstrat2003|5 months ago
raxxorraxor|5 months ago
Far more interesting is how they aggregate the data. I thought many sources moved behind paywalls already.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
raincole|5 months ago
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
doublerebel|5 months ago
skysthelimitt|5 months ago
ivanjermakov|5 months ago
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.
ethbr1|5 months ago
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
oezi|5 months ago
ascagnel_|5 months ago
[0] https://reederapp.com
sjw987|5 months ago
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.
tethys|5 months ago
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.
fresh_broccoli|5 months ago
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.
fresh_broccoli|5 months ago
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.
imiric|5 months ago
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.
BeetleB|5 months ago
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!
buster|5 months ago
(I was very skeptical about Kagi Assistant but now i am a happy Kagi Ultimate subscriber).
jjice|5 months ago
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.
bobbylarrybobby|5 months ago
SOLAR_FIELDS|5 months ago
alphazard|5 months ago
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.
pants2|5 months ago
tower-shield|5 months ago
hn111|5 months ago
bl4ckneon|5 months ago
tomcatfish|5 months ago
unshavedyak|5 months ago
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.
medstrom|5 months ago
Could you guys maybe print it on paper and send it to my physical mailbox, so I can do this ritual with breakfast? :-)
toomuchtodo|5 months ago
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)
0xdeadbeefbabe|5 months ago
sota_pop|5 months ago
ashivkum|5 months ago
tiltowait|5 months ago
kevcampb|5 months ago
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.
Spivak|5 months ago
kqgnkqgn|5 months ago
4dm1r4lg3n3r4l|5 months ago
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...
mac-attack|5 months ago
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
leakycap|5 months ago
> 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.
imiric|5 months ago
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.
rfarley04|5 months ago
Nice release nonetheless!
insane_dreamer|5 months ago
CGMthrowaway|5 months ago
daveoc64|5 months ago
The UK section seems to have a heavy bias towards news from Scotland.
It looks too simplistic for me to actually use.
baggachipz|5 months ago
Guillaume86|5 months ago
sciencejerk|5 months ago
sanbor|5 months ago
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
lyu07282|5 months ago
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.
amarant|5 months ago
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!
maleldil|5 months ago
skybrian|5 months ago
"Mark as read" checks all the checkmarks, but since they're still there after a reload, I don't see the point.
0xffff2|5 months ago
4dm1r4lg3n3r4l|5 months ago
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.
panarchy|5 months ago
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.
ugoasidjg|5 months ago
ed_mercer|5 months ago
bluGill|5 months ago
If you live in big city beware that your newspaper probably is lacking your neighborhood coverage which is what you need.
freediver|5 months ago
https://github.com/kagisearch/kite-public
numbsafari|5 months ago
stared|5 months ago
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.
ctrlp|5 months ago
joshstrange|5 months ago
khaleel-kagi|5 months ago
BeetleB|5 months ago
luxurytent|5 months ago
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!
tantalor|5 months ago
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?
giorgio-kagi|5 months ago
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!
systemstops|5 months ago
benrapscallion|5 months ago
insane_dreamer|5 months ago
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.
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
msravi|5 months ago
e40|5 months ago
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.
rsingel|5 months ago
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
tolerance|5 months ago
bdunks|5 months ago
Can you expand on why?
BatteryMountain|5 months ago
digest|5 months ago
user3939382|5 months ago
kkukshtel|5 months ago
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.
28304283409234|5 months ago
kstrauser|5 months ago
patrakov|5 months ago
That's despite the appropriate HTTP header:
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
khaleel-kagi|5 months ago
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.
chrisweekly|5 months ago
guilamu|5 months ago
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...
dani_kagi|5 months ago
lagrange77|5 months ago
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.
flyer23|5 months ago
alexsmirnov|5 months ago
BOOSTERHIDROGEN|5 months ago
user_7832|5 months ago
Apart from that, it's really nice! Good job, kagi team!
deafpolygon|5 months ago
andhuman|5 months ago
nobodywillobsrv|5 months ago
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.
JLGSpeer|5 months ago
I had a little trouble imagining myself using this in particular but I'm a big fan of the search engine.
boxed|5 months ago
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.
lyu07282|5 months ago
ramesh31|5 months ago
News is broken because journalism is no longer a viable career path. No amount of RSS aggregators will fix that.
throwaway984393|5 months ago
[deleted]
al_borland|5 months ago
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.
dingaling|5 months ago
https://www.economist.com/the-world-in-brief
msqinfo|5 months ago
I'm currently working on a major overhaul to provide more holistic context around news by better surfacing less-discussed events.
clueless|5 months ago
HelloUsername|5 months ago
sambf|5 months ago
[0] https://courrierinternational.com
guywithahat|5 months ago
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.
kkfx|5 months ago
marcus_holmes|5 months ago
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.
freediver|5 months ago
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.
carlosjobim|5 months ago
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.
kylehotchkiss|5 months ago
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.
k2enemy|5 months ago
I think it is human curated, but I'm not positive about that.
charv|5 months ago
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.
drewbitt|5 months ago
eterm|5 months ago
An attitude of "Hook me up to the novelty juice, this is old weak sauce", is a sign of internet / news addiction.
rimmontrieu|5 months ago
The news feature feels a bit underwhelming and underdeveloped though, especially with the LLM/AI approach.
jwitchel|5 months ago
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.
Animats|5 months ago
(Edit) Now I see. You have to scroll through the story and click "Close story" to get back. It's "mobile first".
cgriswald|5 months ago
ironmagma|5 months ago
guybedo|5 months ago
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...
tuckwat|5 months ago
* for now
W0lfEagle|5 months ago
ChrisArchitect|5 months ago
Bunch of discussion here 3 months ago? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44518473
graynk|5 months ago
It was in beta then.
smoothbenny|5 months ago
hughes|5 months ago
luxurytent|5 months ago
Sort of like a loss leader, eg the Costco hot dog :-)
alltheseas|5 months ago
[deleted]
zkmon|5 months ago
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.
maelito|5 months ago
- 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.
artursapek|5 months ago
kubafu|5 months ago
Let me open the app once a month and see a summary of what has happened over it.
timeinput|5 months ago
EasyMark|5 months ago
devinprater|5 months ago
aryonoco|5 months ago
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?
freediver|5 months ago
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.
mikelward|5 months ago
But the Sports section is bad. The game finished 10 hours ago and it's still showing a match preview.
szszrk|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
durakot|5 months ago
self_awareness|5 months ago
Sweepi|5 months ago
vjulian|5 months ago
mr_machine|5 months ago
dani_kagi|5 months ago
xnacly|5 months ago
osamabinladen|5 months ago
tethys|5 months ago
numbers|5 months ago
acd|5 months ago
sidrag22|5 months ago
can't imagine it would go over well in the court system.
mrcwinn|5 months ago
hendersoon|5 months ago
lblume|5 months ago
hagbard_c|5 months ago
https://github.com/nextcloud/news
smlacy|5 months ago
treetalker|5 months ago
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
codethief|5 months ago
- 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).
Shank|5 months ago
nvarsj|5 months ago
not--felix|5 months ago
[0] https://ivyreader.com
Vexowsky|5 months ago
liquid_thyme|5 months ago
boxerab|5 months ago
TanishqSingla|5 months ago
aleatorianator|5 months ago
sktrdie|5 months ago
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
sam0x17|5 months ago
matcha-video|5 months ago
atonse|5 months ago
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"
clcaev|5 months ago
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?
unknown|5 months ago
[deleted]
jscd|5 months ago
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...
alexfromapex|5 months ago
larodi|5 months ago
laweijfmvo|5 months ago
embit|5 months ago
[1] https://embit.ca