This started as a response to an offhand mention of Kagi in another thread, but on consideration, it’s both a potential hijack to that thread and worth a thread of its own. It’s on my “maybe i should buy this” list, so I’m curious about it.
So, who has experience with Kagi? How are you liking it? What package did you buy? (Or are you using the free samples?)
Kagi uses multiple sources, not just Google (per Wikipedia). And apparently also offers an AI summary? But i think it’s mostly driven by Google’s search data.
I’ve been using it for about a year now. I started out with maybe 90% Google, 10% Kagi, comparing them side-by-side. After a few weeks it got to 50-50 as I tailored Kagi’s results more and more (this is one of their best features, the ability to see the domains others have chosen to block or highlight, and to do the same for your account… for example, people generally block Pinterest and heavily promote Wikipedia and reddit). Now Kagi is about 99% of my searches, and it’s completely replaced with Google Search for me both at home and at work. (I still use Gmail and Gdocs, though.)
I don’t think they use the Google index (Google doesn’t allow that) but they do combine both third-party indices (like Marginalia) and some of their own results: Search Sources | Kagi's Docs
I like it a lot too. It’s important to me that I pay for this, because that means Kagi’s interests are aligned with mine rather than advertisers’. There are no paid ads on Kagi. (There is still, of course, SEO spam. And AI slop, these days. But they also have a handy “flag AI spam” button next to every result.)
I also don’t use their AI stuff (just because I already have Gemini and Claude, and formerly ChatGPT). They don’t push their AI on you like Google does, trying to shove Gemini into every orifice and pore on your body.
Would strongly recommend Kagi to anybody dissatisfied with all the Alphabetical enshittification. They have a free 100-search trial and the unlimited plans are affordable and worth the peace of mind of not having to deal with Google’s increasing spamminess and general user-hostility every day.
Oh, and as an aside, I got mostly the same end effect on Google (meaning no ads and tailored domain rankings) with a combination of uBlock Origin and uBlacklist for Chrome or for Firefox. uBlacklist lets you block entire domains from Google search result pages, and I used it to filter out all the Medium, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Forbes, MSN, and Instagram spam even before Kagi. That made search much more bearable.
The only difference is that with Google, it’s a constant arms race: My blockers against their ads and spam. With Kagi, we’re on the same side and working together to try to make search better. To Google, you’re the product that they sell to advertisers. To Kagi, you’re the customer to please.
Just tried it and immediately found one thing that it does better than google: when I put in the name of my blog it comes up as the first match and has listings for various posts. (for some reason that I’ve never been able to figure out or fix, google search does not show any matches at all)
Aside: If you care about this and you haven’t already tried, it might be worth signing up for Google Search Console and verifying your ownership: https://search.google.com/search-console/about
That gives you access to Google’s suite of webmaster-facing SEO tools to better understand why your site isn’t ranking (maybe it’s blacklisted or unreachable for some reason).
And yeah, this is probably why Kagi will forever remain a niche product. Having to pay for web search is something people haven’t done in decades (or maybe ever, except for AOL and Compuserve?). And advertising brings in MUCH more money than the $5-10/mo you’d pay Kagi.
To me this is a good thing: They are not trying to become the next hyper-scaler multinational, just an organized and useful library of information. It’s a small company with a singular focus on a good experience.
Google used to be that way too, for the first few years.
Thanks for the reply but I’ve been down that road with no luck and basically given up. I got a lot of advice from the Google “community” but never came up with a fix.
No big deal really, my friends have the blog bookmarked. I do miss getting occasional comments from people who came across a post that piqued their interest when it came up in their search results. Once I got a nice note from a woman about a post where I talked about visiting her father’s antique car collection in Three Rivers CA. When he passed away she was looking for mentions online and found my post with pictures of him and his cars.
I see. Yeah, Google can be kinda a black box when it deems you unworthy for whatever mysterious reason…
That’s a nice memory!
Back to the OP, it reminds me of Kagi’s Small Web feature that deliberately features small, personal/hobbyist sites (like the Geocities days). There’s even a filter for it in the regular Kagi search so you can limit results to those sites and filter out the corporate marketing crap.
We are not affiliated with the legendary Kagi - the shareware payments platform. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.
I just tried a few of my 100 free searches and so for it is outstanding. It’s fast an thorough. It’s a little fucked up how they count what a “search” is towards their total of 100. If you click on “see more results” it counts as a search and if you click on a link from the results it counts as a search. Very minor complaint.
It’s $5/month for 300 searches which I think would get used up pretty quickly with the above criteria. $10/month for unlimited searches. Both of those get you Standard AI and Quick Mode. $25/month for Premium AI and Professional Mode.
Yeah, the $/5 for 300 searches plan was what I used the first month or two. I switched to unlimited once I was satisfied it was capable of replacing Google.
I wouldn’t necessarily pay for AI, though, unless you really want it integrated into Kagi. They’re not training their own models (they can’t; they’re way too small for that) so they’re just re-using the other major models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI:
So if you want the AI stuff you might as well go directly to those sources, since they tend to give you much more usage first-party allowance than when you pay-per-use via an API like Kagi does.
