Tell me about Kagi search

In My Humble Opinion
1

Randomly this morning I came across two mentions of Kagi, a new (?) search engine that I had not heard of before. It runs on a paid subscription model, so there are no ads or sponsored results. Has anyone tried it? There is a free trial, and I may give it a go to see if the experience is better than Google, but I thought I would ask here first to get some opinions.

I am fairly heavily hooked into the Google universe, but the sponsored search results are indeed getting annoying, so there is some attraction for me to try an alternative. But $10/month for unlimited search? That seems a bit steep to me unless it’s significantly better.

Any thoughts?

2

I’ve tried it on and off for several years now, and started subscribing a couple months ago. First on the $5 limited plan and then eventually upgraded to the $10 plan. It’s been… fine?

I switched not really because it was better, but because I was pissed at Google for some unrelated Chrome changes and finally decided to bite the bullet and move away from the Google ecosystem (after 20 years!).

On average, in my totally non scientific testing, the search results have not been better than Google for me. Usually about on par, but occasionally worse. I have not yet found a situation where it outperforms Google. It’s definitely better than Bing though.

So why do I pay for it if it’s not significantly better? Honestly, I’m just tired of Google’s advertising driven malice. I wanted a search engine aligned with MY needs as their customer, not an advertiser’s needs. Even disregarding the Chrome changes, the Google search result pages have been getting more and more filled with SEO spam and paid ads. It’s just not a very good search engine anymore. I can mitigate that somewhat using uBlacklist to block certain domains altogether (like Quora or Medium), but Kagi has that built-in. If I see a result that looks spammy, I can block that entire domain easily.

Kagi has other little niche features too, like a filter to search the “small” (indie/organic/non-corporate) web. It’s very customizable in general, letting me rank certain domains higher, lower, or blocked altogether. It also lets me choose where and if I want AI generated summaries with my search results. The whole thing is a labor of love that tries to respect you as a user, a paying customer, instead of trying to mislead you into clicking on an ad. There are no ads. And I also applaud their efforts towards making Orion, a new web browser.

That said, Google still has niches that Kagi simply doesn’t compete in. Google Scholar and NotebookLM are indispensable research tools for me. Kagi doesn’t offer Maps, Books, etc. Maybe someday.

And besides, ChatGPT has replaced about 70% of what I’d normally use for a search engine for anyway. For the rest, Kagi is “good enough”.

But at the end of the day, I didn’t switch because of better results. I switched because it was more customizable and respectful of my time and usage. Fundamentally, I believe the web can only get less trashy if we can move away from the ad-sponsored model. I’d rather pay Kagi (or would’ve paid Google if they offered that option, like they do for YouTube) than be subject to ongoing adspam. If you want to monetize me, please just bill me directly…

If you solely wanted higher quality search results, I think adding uBlock Origin and uBlacklist will do that more than Kagi would. But I’m hoping Kagi grows enough that it can one day present a more user-aligned business model for the web.

3

Thank you for this detailed response - super informative! I appreciate the perspective.

I’m definitely not looking to exit the Google-sphere entirely. I use Maps, Gmail, and Drive extensively and I have Google One storage, for example. But I keep being disappointed with the search engine now, so I’m low-key looking at other options.

4

From what I can see, it appears to be basically an aggregator, with perhaps some additional filtering to try to minimize adverts & paid results?

For the moment I use duckduckgo, which seems to be roughly similar but free.

I actively avoid Google if possible. The days when their motto was “don’t be evil” are long gone, I think. Still on Firefox for browsing.

5

REALLY?? Good Lord, what is the world coming to?

I did some detailed experiments when ChatGPT came out, and concluded that its propensity to hallucinate rendered it massively unreliable. I wouldn’t use any of these LLM systems for anything even remotely important!

6

For what it’s worth, I use both Kagi (on my computer) and Google (on the work laptop) daily. I can’t really tell them apart anymore and often have to check the logo to see which one I’m on. I take that to mean their results are similarly bad, lol. I dread having to use either one instead of ChatGPT.

They do have their own index, but you’re right that they also include results from other sources.

Google does that too, just at a much bigger scale, and with many in-house sources.

7

FYI, DuckDuckGo uses Bing in the background.

“Of course, we have more traditional links and images in our search results too, which we largely source from Bing.”

8

There’s a lot of other topics about this already (see 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and more in the “AI” tag), so I don’t want to hijack this one. Happy to discuss more in any of the other topics, though!

While I don’t have the exact stats to prove it (I don’t know what % of Kagi’s results come from their own index vs Marginalia’s, for example), it feels sufficiently different to me to qualify as its own search engine instead of “just another aggregator”.

And their customization options and lack of ads make them pretty unique, search sources notwithstanding. It’s a degree of personalization that no other engine, as far as I know, offers. I block a few dozen spam domains, deprioritize a few others, and prioritize a few usually-good sources, and that makes a pretty big difference in result quality (though you can accomplish similar with Google and uBlacklist).

Kagi can then use those raise/lower/block signals in aggregate to refine their default results. (Seems like its users really, really hate Pinterest and strongly dislike junk news sites.)

9

Quick update here: I’ve been using Kagi Search full-time now for the last few weeks, under their $10 unlimited plan, and it’s completely replaced Google Search for me.

The results are still “fine”… about as useful (or not) as Google, and still has SEO spam. But I’m happy enough with it to keep using it and paying for it. Not so happy as to evangelize it to friends and family. It’s just… fine.

Blocking Pinterest, Medium, Forbes, Quora, LinkedIn, Twitter/X, YouTube, WikiHow, and AlternativeTo (all SEO junk sites) from the search results has massively improved their quality, but it was easy enough to do that with uBlacklist on Google too.

But overall, ChatGPT is still way more helpful to me in day-to-day life than either search engine, especially for any moderately complex question that requires some explanation. ChatGPT can also do its own searches now, and then summarize the results with citations. (As can Kagi with its “Assistant” mode, for that matter… AI is everywhere now.)

10

Many thanks for the update!

I think my first step to try to improve my Google search experience will be to try uBlacklist and see how that goes. I’m not ready to invest in Kagi yet. But if that doesn’t improve things for me, I’ll give the Kagi free trial a go.

11

PS. I also added the UnSponsored extension to Chrome to get rid of Sponsored Results in Google Search. Seems to be working so far.