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Highly recommend giving this blog post that takes a little bit of a deep dive into Kagi.
https://マリウス.com/doubting-your-favorite-web-search-engine/
(Not scary url, just punycode) 👍
The author surely likes that the mascot is a dog. It feels more of a read and analysis of the terms of use than a deep dive of the tool but it was a good read.
I also liked the “reminder”.
Mullvad Leta is the way
I’m not paying for a search engine. Duck Duck Go for everyday usage. Yandex when I’m looking for media.
Yeah, no way do I need another subscription in my life when there’s a suitable substitute.
I quite enjoy Qwant
Just had a conversation about this. I’ll copypasta what I said there.
tl;dr: they’re all in on AI (their own model, FastGPT, which is terrible), they make some very questionable business decisions with limited funds, and have a poor understanding of what Personally Identifiable Information (PII) actually is.
I could compromise on some of these things, but if I’m going to pay for their service as a Google alternative, I need to compromise less than I do with Google already.
Also DDG is a perfectly viable option.
Appreciate you linking in your blog post. I’ve been on the fence about Kagi and you bring up a lot of good points informed by sources I’m unlikely to delve into.
To put you back on the fence, it had the best algorithm when I tested it some time ago. It showed me things I wanted by default. Google always needs some massaging and ddg needs a !g
Dammit, my fence picket didn’t even get cold!
I tried it and it was good, but not worth the money to me. Since that time, everything has been going more and more to shit, so while I am not there yet, everything else could eventually get shitty enough that I will maybe then be good to pay monthly for a search engine.
It depends on what you want. I use Kagi but I have not sold it on my friends and family because for most of them, it doesn’t really make sense.
I’ve found it to be the best search engine, but I also think DuckDuckGo is generally fine. The $5/month plan with 300 searches per month is too limiting, IMO. I feel like anyone who searches that lightly will struggle to justify paying for Kagi over using DDG. For unlimited searches you need to step up to the $10/month plan.
When I started using Kagi, I did the free trial and every time I did a search, I’d do it in both Kagi and Google or DDG. It quickly became clear to me that Kagi was better, but I suspect this will vary a lot by your field, your tastes, and your personal search style. I mean, maybe there’s someone out there who actually wants to look at Pinterest results. I guess?!
If you ever considered paying for ChatGPT Pro or Claude Pro ($20/month), then Kagi’s Ultimate plan ($25/month) is probably a better value. It includes unlimited search, plus access to all the major premium models. On the other hand, ChatGPT Pro gives you access to image generation too, if you care about that.
Kagi’s research agent is legitimately great. It is nothing like the bullshit generator Google has. It will take a prompt, then run multiple web searches to get relevant info, recursively if needed, and then give a meaningful response with citations. It shows you the exact search queries it uses, along with the results it pulls from. I’ve used it to find accurate answers to problems that I realistically could not have found with traditional search engines; in one case the actual answer was something like 18 results deep in the 5th search it performed. I think most people would give up before digging that deep in search results.
This is what AI is good for: automating gruntwork. Not doing things I couldn’t do myself, but doing things I don’t fucking want to do myself because they are tedious and frustrating. 99% of AI applications are pure garbage. Kagi’s is part of the other 1%.
I’ve been on the $5 a month plan, and go over probably half the time. The months when I do go over, it just means I start the next month a couple of days early. I’m probably actually somewhere around $6 a calendar month; my Kagi month is probably only 28 days or so.
DuckDuckGo pro is $10 a mo but you get advanced model, on top of vpn and other crap.
I use Kagi because the truth is all other corporate alternatives at this point are unusable swill.
That said, I do not like the company and disagree with their choices in many aspects.
For one, while they don’t force you to use AI features, there isn’t a way to explicitly turn them off for your account, there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.
They still don’t run their own index, instead complacent to just pay the other search providers. Additionally, if you’re trying to escape Google… Kagi runs on Google Cloud Services.
There’s more complaints, and I’m sure others will chime in, but that’s my take.
there always the opportunity to rack up token costs if you accidently hit one of the AI buttons.
How do you mean? I don’t think there’s any way to incur charges for AI usages beyond your subscription fee unless you are coding against their API.
Hey, Good job not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
What specifically do you think is hard to avoid? I’ve never accidentally triggered a quick answer, personally
I am open to the idea of paying for quality services that put the customer first. Hell, I pay for my email and have done so for years.
But Kagi has always squicked me out a bit. Some of their business practices over the years have been rather questionable, especially their push into AI which is exactly the sort of thing someone looking at Kagi would probably want to avoid. They are also very expensive. They’re one of those services that just assumes everyone is American so they just give a $ cost and don’t specify beyond that, so I’m going to assume their prices are in USD which means a plan for my dad and myself is $21CAD a month. That absurdly overpriced for a search engine subscription.
To put that into perspective: A YouTube premium family plan covers up to 6 accounts and is the same price and includes unlimited video and music streaming. Thoughts about YouTube aside and looking at this from a pure value perspective, paying that same price just for a search engine is a godawful shit deal. Do you know what my email costs per month? $1.25CAD
I tried it, paid for it, cancelled it. I tested it with the same queries with ddg, startpage, brave, and qwant via 4get. The results were essentially the same. Kagi did provide more context in the description of the results but it wasn’t anything I would pay a premium for. the majority of features I just didn’t use, the assistant and fastgpt were a waste, lenses were fine and having fediverse on by default is neat but nothing I’d call home about.
If it were cheaper sure, I might stick with it but I can’t justify the price to anyone wanting to use a search engine. $5 for 300 searches a month is a joke. I also don’t like the fact that if you want to pay with something other than a credit card (paypal, venmo, etc) you get charged extra cause Kagi doesn’t want to eat the fees. Also there’s zero option to opt out of paying for the “AI” features, you can turn them off sure…but you’re still going to pay for them.
If your internet usage consists of constant searching and LLM use for searching then sure, you’re going to be paying $10+ a month and be happy with it. But there was nothing Kagi offered that knocked my socks off. if anything, felt like I was getting scammed.
I tried it, and liked it, but stopped using it based on cost. If it was open source or somehow contributed to the open web, I would continue paying for it.
I went searching for a new search engine. I tried SearXNG, but I wasn’t impressed with the results. So now I use duckduckgo and ecosia, because if I have to indirectly use google, at least I can get some trees planted in the process.
IIRC Ecosia and DDG use Bing as their backend, not Google.
Some people like them, they do have at least some ties to a Russian company which is a no from me at the moment.
Paying for Yandex APIs is a product of their goal to be the best search engine available. They pay for access to nearly every major search provider and wouldn’t want to lose access to Yandex results just because of the country they’re located in.
They added AI which I thought was one of the main points of using an alternative search engine so you could get away from that nonsense?
It’s an optional service, not baked into the core product.
I’m the “anti-ai” person in my group of friends. Which isn’t strictly true, I’m bearish on AI, not wholly anti. I find Kagi’s separation appropriate, and actually finds some use (and better results than ChatGPT) with their AI assistant. It’s particularly useful for me debugging simple scripts and excel formulas.
It isn’t perfect overall, but well worth the few bucks each month. It’s one of the only subscriptions I’m not actively trying to get rid of.
Yes absolutely. The results are actually useful, they don’t have an incentive to keep you from finding what you are searching for. There is way less copywritten content and if there is, you can just block it.
Whenever I have to go back to “free” alternatives I am shocked by how much worse it is.
I’m a fan. It took me a few weeks of properly rating (raising, lowering, and blocking) to get truly customized results. Once I did though, I found I’m able to research far faster than before. I’ve also become a fan of their AI assistant. It has multiple llm’s to choose from and is more private than using them directly.
