Kagi added a setting for removing paywalled links from search results

Let's be real: the paywall is the internet's most successful scam. Publishers hide content behind a subscription curtain, Google happily indexes it anyway, and you waste three clicks and thirty seconds of your life before realizing you're never getting past paragraph two. Kagi just said "nah" to that entire charade with a single setting that filters paywalled domains from your results. It's not a hack, it's not a workaround — it's a search engine respecting your time instead of your ad impressions. The broader story here is about who actually controls your search experience. Google's entire revenue model depends on you clicking through to as many pages as possible, whether or not those pages are useful. A paywalled result is still a click, still an impression, still a data point. Kagi, charging a flat subscription, has no incentive to send you into a dead end. They're aligned with the user because they're paid by the user. That's not a coincidence — that's a business model. And let's talk about the HN reception. 1,119 points and 363 comments on a changelog entry? That's not people being excited about a feature toggle. That's people venting years of frustration with the paywall economy. Every comment thread is someone recounting their personal war with a specific publisher's wall. Kagi didn't just add a filter — they validated a decade of user pain. The cynical take: this is a marketing move, a differentiator for a search engine that's still a rounding error in Google's market share. Fine. But even cynical moves can be good moves. If Kagi's setting forces Google to notice that users actively want paywalled content gone, maybe we get a future where search engines actually tell you what's behind a wall before you click. That's a future worth paying for. Source: https://kagi.com/changelog#11296