HACKER Q&A
📣 seansh

Is it impossible to use Kagi as default search engine on iOS?


I've been using Kagi for about a year and am very happy with it. But as of recently Apple stopped allowing custom search engines to be set as default for Safari. Kagi has a hack for fixing it where you set the default to something you never use and then the Kagi app somehow redirects that website but it kind of works but then stops working multiple times a day.

I tried their browser Orion which comes by default with Kagi and adblockers but the browser is very buggy and even loses my tabs sometimes.

I tried firefox and it's very nice but it doesn't have adblocker so it's a no go.

Any suggestions folks?

  👤 nop_slide Accepted Answer ✓
Kagi for iOS was working great for the first month I had it but the last two weeks the extension seems to only work half the time. Glad to hear I’m not the only one.
👤 havemurci
I use the Safari extension Redirect Web with this configuration:

Redirect From:

^https://www\.google\.com/search\?q=(.*?)\&.*$

Redirect To:

https://kagi.com/search?q=$1

Sometimes it flashes the Google results before loading Kagi but overall it works pretty well.

👤 phrz
My recommendation: use xSearch for iOS! It's a Safari extension app so no need to use a nonstandard browser. I use it to give me custom !bang searches for various databases, but it has an option to override the Safari default search engine. It works very reliably on iOS and Mac.
👤 kemotep
I just use Firefox for iOS and don’t use websites with excessive advertising. In fact with the out of the box privacy settings for Firefox and iOS, many sites ask me to disable my ad blocker before continuing. I don’t have one to disable which makes those prompts pretty funny.
👤 Raed667
ask your representatives to stop apple from being apple.
👤 unlikelymordant
I haven't tried on ios, but brave browser has an inbuilt ad blocker. Might be worth a try. I am quite happy with brave and kagi on android.
👤 aborsy
Does Kagi use something like ChatGPT in the backend?
👤 freediver
Vlad from Kagi here.

We are in the process of rewriting our Safari extension for Kagi search, which proved to be very challanging (Apple seems to really not want people doint this). It is open-source and you can check the discussion here [1]

Our current extension should mostly work though (maybe needs full reinstall) [2]

We also launched Orion browser on both macOS and iOS which is made as a Safari replacement and comes with Kagi integrated. [3]

Finally, there are third party extensions that you can use like xSearch [4] and HyperWeb [5].

Do not forget to move Apple in the right direction to allow use of custom search engines by sending feedback [6]

[1] https://github.com/kagisearch/browser_extensions/pull/59

[2] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kagi-search-for-safari/id16228...

[3] https://kagi.com/orion

[4] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/xsearch-for-safari/id157990206...

[5] https://apps.apple.com/us/app/hyperweb/id1581824571

[6] https://developer.apple.com/bug-reporting/

👤 bcolumbia
You need to delete the Kagi app and reinstall. They had a bug and reverted the app to the working version again. It’s been working great since I reinstalled!