Kagi is a subscription-based search engine that argues that paying for search is a reasonable thing to do in order to avoid ads and companies selling your information. They also have lenses, e.g. for searching the fediverse specifically. Anyone that wants to share their experience of using Kagi?
Yup, and it has been great. In terms of time saved and general result quality for what I do, it’s worth it to me.
I am. Loving it.
same!
I pay for it, like $100 or so a year. I don’t use any of the AI features, just the search. The search results are great, better than Google. I’m happy with it.
I agree
Why not just use this and it is free https://github.com/searxng/searxng
It’s not as good as Google from 20 years ago, but much better than Google today.
I didn’t choose it for the privacy, I chose it because I wanted to actually get results for my searches.
Google gets me answers about 20% of the time,
Kagi about 50%,
and (generic - not Kagi) AI about 80% of the time.The problem with AI as search is that the other 20% is when it will confidently give me wrong answers and waste hours of my time, so I guess Kagi is still useful to me.
I don’t know why Kagi would be shilled in the Privacy community when they don’t seem to actually understand privacy… They claim to be privacy focused out of one side of their mouth, while asking for more and more information from the user to allow their AI features to work out of the other side. They apparently resolve this in their own head by just claiming that any information you voluntarily give to them isn’t private information.
It’ll be tough for you to find a middle of the road review of this, because people either pay a monthly subscription fee, and are aware of this, and use it because otherwise they’d be wasting their money… or they don’t use, it and can’t really contribute.
Personally, I’ve been turned off by it for a couple reasons:
- I do not agree with their manifesto, which flies in the face of privacy and the dangers of the Filter Bubble
And when you ask your own AI a question like “does God exist?” it will answer it relying on biases you preconfigured. When you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it will do so knowing what kind of food you like to eat. The same will happen when you ask it to recommend a good coffee maker - it will know the brands you like, your likely budget and the kind of coffee you usually drink. All this information will be volunteered to the AI by you…
- The face of the company is rather weird
- Subscription money goes to AI
- It doesn’t offer me sufficient value compared to free search engines that keep me anonymous by default.
ETA: If you use Kagi, don’t rely on promises alone to keep your data private. Consider a masked email for login (you must provide one), and definitely use their Privacy Pass to keep your searches unlinked from your account instead.
This is very similar to my experience.
I was a Kagi user for around 3 years, didn’t really ran into issues looking up stuff, but also never really had to compare it with other search engines. I found answers to what I needed, and it was a passable answer. Don’t need much else from a search engine.
I left when they started investing my money into muddying search with AI. Yes, you can turn it off. But that still means I get way less worth for what I pay, because instead of focusing the respurces on making a better search engine, they are focusing on AI.
I found out I’m ok with just using DDG or recently Ecosia. Both have AI, I can turn it off, but at least I’m not paying for it so IDC. In the case of Ecosia, at least they have a greenwashing twist as a bonus so I can feel better about myself, lol.
EDIT: Just to make it clear, I kind of trust Ecosia in their mission and I respect what their goal is, but I’m having a hard time trusting a company that adds an OpenAI-based chatbot to their site. They might’ve already changed it, but when they rolled it out and I saw the sentence “Ask our Ecosiabot about how to be more enviromental friendly” literally right under “This chat is subjected to OpenAI privacy policy” is so extremely ironic I lost a lot of trust in them. But still, at least they are trying to greenwash a bit.
Thanks for reminding me about Ecosia. I hadn’t seen any of this, so I looked at their privacy policy and they actually refer to Mistral as if it is their exclusive provider:
LLM provider
We offer an AI-based chat service that allows you to have back and forth conversations on topics of your choice. If you use our chat service, queries will be sent to our model provider Mistral AI.
But then, much farther down, they mention OpenAI.
The provider we primarily use is Mistral AI… Ecosia may engage OpenAI as a backup service provider where Mistral is unavailable or a fallback is necessary to ensure continuity… You can find more information in OpenAI’s privacy policy. OpenAI will store your input and output data for 30 days for quality assurance purposes.
Wow I did not expect to enjoy reading that blog post as much as I did. This Vlad dude comes off like a petulant child.
- I do not agree with their manifesto, which flies in the face of privacy and the dangers of the Filter Bubble
Been using kagi for 4 months and just renewed as a paid subscriber. Just want to mention things I haven’t seen mentioned yet but this is not an exhaustive list:
– you can get a discount through kagi specials. I think I paid for a year of Ente ($40 bucks or so) and got three months of Kagi free. Maybe the other way around through Ente but they have other partners as well
– the AI is a problem for many which is understandable. I have found its implementation sane and opt-in only. The addition of AI did not affect the cost of the subscription (they get their cut from a 20% increase over the API cost apparently). A recent Kagi Feedback thread suggests they will be restructuring subscriptions into pure search and pure AI at some point along with a combined plan in the future though TBD. They’ve kind of backed themselves in a corner as it seems like half the userbase wants nothing to do with AI and the other half sees its removal as a feature previously added at no extra cost being removed and thus a value loss to their sub. They’ve said in the past their search is FAR more expensive than AI (which is why it was added for free) but that seems to contradict some of their recent statements about the restructuring.
– Kagi Translate is great, obviously LLM based but machine translation is kind of what LLMs are for and it is an easy replacement for google translate
– Kagi Maps is rolling out slowly and should have apps at some point which would be a huge win for leaving gmaps
– I have actually found their universal summarizer pretty nice for getting a preview of articles or YouTube videos, seems like it can also crawl behind pay walls
– I will sometimes mindlessly scroll the Small Web index which is a very cool little project offered for free
– they have a no log policy on search but allow you to take it a step farther via privacy pass which allows you to log in via an anonymous token if you want to ensure your account it not tied to a specific search (I am no cyber security expert but I’ve read its a legit implementation)
In summary, Kagi sometimes gets a chronic case of startup brain and I get the uneasiness around some of their incorporation of AI. At the same time I have found basically all of their tools useful to some degree and I easily get 10 dollars of value out of the sub a month.
Great write-up.
Despite my concerns, if I could purchase a subscription that was free of AI investment, I think I might.
Despite how pro-AI their ownership is, imo they have the least intrusive AI options of any search I’ve used, free or not
Thanks, you are definitely not alone there. I hope they make an offering like this soon as there is clearly demand for it.
Is kagi maps and translate included in the subscription? Any other services? This is the first I’ve heard of it
Maps is just a web app at the moment but there are apps for iOS and Android supposedly in the works: https://kagi.com/maps/
Kagi Translate is a web app and has apps available. You can do quick translations for free but the better models and features like document translation are behind the paywall: https://translate.kagi.com/
As for other features theres a list in the user guide. Mainly search, summarize, news, translate, maps and assistant. All in various stages of development, you can read more here: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/
I have been for over a year now. I love it personally got my mom and wife on it too
They give you a free trial (no CC required) so just give it a try for yourself.
Its the least bad option. AFAIK no one else even offers paid search, much less ones that allow you to block sources, or limit your search to “the small web”.
No, there’s other paid search engines, the others just look like they are from the pre-iPod era and have suboptimal spiders
I am just in the end of my first month of subscription (the cheapest, $5 one). I love it! I mean, now Kagi proposes to either pay more or forward the request to ddg/google, but I’m ok with that because the new month starts tomorrow.
Well, it is a search, and you can search with it, and find stuff. Surprisingly, in 2010 that didn’t sound so awesome, but now it does. Because it is so great not to scroll through all the “sponsored content” and AI bullshit.
Also, Google dropped most of the search syntax, so I couldn’t use “minus words” or, in contrary, make it unable tp depp some words from the request. Kagi has an entire page with advanced search settings, so if you suddenly find something super specific, you will like it.
The free trial is 100 searches, so it’s enough time to see if it’s worth it - I think it isRandom 2-year-old article that assumes to instruct me on what I shouldn’t do immediately in the title must be right.
Been paying for it for probably two years now. It’s not a silver bullet for how supremely fucked the entire web is but it’s much nicer than anything else I’ve tried. It does what I ask and, more importantly it doesn’t do what I don’t ask.
I like it a lot. I pay for it through work though. If I didn’t, I’d probably still use their $5/mo plan - it is worth it to me to not have to deal with google.
DDG is fine for basic stuff but gets caught in the SEO trap.
Yes been using it over a year now. Never want to go back.
