Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.
Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:
- Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
- “Lenses”, which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
- All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type “!yt” in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
- Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more
This blog post goes into full details about Kagi’s capabilities.
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I’ve been using Kagi for two months and I’m loving it - the ability to control your results is amazing. Some things I do:
- remove or downrate things like pinterest and w3schools from my results
- rewrite www.reddit.com/* to old.reddit.com/*
- rewrite to send some sources through archive.today or similar to break paywalls
- rewrite to set the language of some sites that GeoIP my location but ignore my language headers
Also, having keyboard controls - like Google used to have - is so welcome, and their AI summarisation tools are actually useful too.
Hmm. I might pay $30/year but this still seems much too expensive for me.
That’s what I thought at first but it saves me so much time in searching and filtering through poor results. The website results are prioritized by being noncommercial and to your preferences, no ad ridden ai articles. You can remove paywall sites from results too.
If you don’t search much they have a limited number of searches version for $5 per month. But yeah if you are struggling financially or live in a poor country this is still expensive.
I just do searches like maybe 4 times a day on average. And i’m by no means poor but even $60/year seems a bit much.
Edit:. Eh, i went ahead and subscribed, we’ll see how it goes. Initially tests were pretty good.
IMO, a search engine costing similar as a streaming service just feels expensive. Makes me want to see a cost breakdown.
I’m hopeful that this price reduction means they are reaching critical masses to make their product more cost effective. I like the idea of it a lot.
It feels expensive because we have become used to free search. That free search is paid by tracking, ads, referrals, and promoting certain results.
Instead of showing you what you are actually looking for, they are just trying to maximize profits off of your search. Giving you what you are looking for is an afterthought.
Kagi does post about financials on their blog. For example this is older but they were actually losing money per search despite the previous higher cost. I was surprised they were able to drop the price so much since they were losing money before.
https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials
Okay, I’m going to ask it seriously: how good is it for searching porn?
This is great. Been using it for 5-6 months now. Have no need to go back to Neva, Duck Duck Go, Google, or Altavista.
What would you say are your top 2-3 reasons you like it?
The results aren’t always perfect, but its more of fighting with SEO.
With DDG I’d often have to switch back to Google for a query. Now when switching from Kagi to Google when I can’t find a result the results are usually worse. For a niche topic I’m vaguely familiar with I’ll usually do ChatGPT so I can get the proper search terms and then find what I want on Kagi.
It tends to improve the more you adjust your personalized weights. I was pretty lazy with that the first month and found it slightly subpar compared with Google. Now it seems way better.
Lots of UI customizations if you don’t like a particular feature. As an example I don’t like their Listicles feature (groups top X type of results). Mostly because that content is poor quality. Disabling the feature just removes those crap results that would go in the widget which is a bonus for me.
The ability to switch lenses (topic contexts) that you can customize those result weights for instead of one global context Google assigns you.
I wish they had a better solution for anonymous searching. There is a pay as you go API I could use with a second account funded from cleaned bitcoin. Would be great if I could use the website though from a pay as you go funded source.
Burner email, Monero, and Trocador.app. mission accomplished.
not at all. with that, you achieve pseudonymity, because even if they can’t know who you are, they can tie every search you do to the very same account, your “pseudonym”.
with DuckDuckgo (and I’m not a DDG fan to be honest) I can just change my IP and clear browser local storage to make several anonymous searches.
with kagi, even if you take the inconvenience of creating a new account each month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single account.
not at all. with that, you achieve pseudonymity, because even if they can’t know who you are, they can tie every search you do to the very same account, your “pseudonym”.
Good point
with kagi, even if you take the inconvenience of creating a new account each month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single account.
Not as far as i can tell. If you used a new burner email every time and paid through trocador with monero your payments could be tied back to the instant exchange, but no farther since monero uses ring signatures.
Not as far as i can tell. If you used a new burner email every time and paid through trocador with monero your payments could be tied back to the instant exchange, but no farther since monero uses ring signatures.
I didn’t mean to your real identity (if you’ve managed to do payment well enough and never leak your IP while using it), I meant that even if you create a new pseudonym every month, all your monthly searches are tied to a single pseudonym, which can reveal a lot about an individual.
Ah, i understand now. They “say” they dont record search history.
From their Privacy & Terms page:
- Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
- We do not log or store your IP address. Your IP address is used only temporarily when enriching location/maps searches, and is not shared with any other party.
- We do not use any web browser analytics or other frontend telemetry.
- We do not display any ads, or have any first-party or third-party tracking in service of ads.
But they totally could
Supposedly they don’t log searches or IP addresses.
For me personally, Neeva’s death is what got me to Kagi in the first place.
Same. Turns out it was much better than Neva the whole time!
nice - unlimited Kagi was good value at $25 for power users but at $10 it’s good value for everyone, even if they never dig around in the settings
my favourite feature is raising / lowering results, as others have mentioned, but I also use the AI summarizer quite often
The summarizer for youtube videos is pretty sweet. Tutorials on youtube now work as text tutorials
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Oh the strict search limits were prohibiting me before, I’ll get right on that!
Very cool. I joined on September 4th and am still on my 100 free search trial. I think the $5 plan will be just fine for me and i get to pay in crypto. Win win.
Why choose this over DuckDuckGo? Genuine question as it has minimal tracking and is free.
At the core, you’re making a decision between a paid service and an ad-supported one.
Going deeper, Kagi has a lot of features over DuckDuckGo:
- In addition to inheriting DDG’s bangs, it also allows you to create your own.
- The ability to boost and block specific domains in search results
- Access to the Universal Summarizer, which can summarize websites, YouTube videos and PDF documents
and a few more.
I’ve not come anywhere near the 1500/mo on my duo plan, but not having to think about it at all is nice. Kagi is soooo good.
How precise is it ? If I search something, is it going to replace it by what it thinks I want ?
What about the logs ? Is there any logs, if yes how long they keep them ?
Where are located the servers ? And where are from the investors?
Your post sounds and looks like an ad. Especially when it points to the product’s blog.
How precise is it? If I search something, is it going to replace it by what it thinks I want?
You can always create an account and use the freei trial. For me personally, the search results have always been what I was looking for.
What about the logs? Is there any logs, if yes how long they keep them?
There are no logs.
Where are located the servers?
Kagi has multiple servers around the globe, and will connect you to the closest one to you.
And where are from the investors?
Kagi’s investors are mainly regular Kagi users: https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round
Your post sounds and looks like an ad.
I wanted to use the text box to provide some info about what Kagi actually is, since the title alone doesn’t explain. What should I have done differently in your opinion?
This is great news. Been using Kagi for just over a month now, and it’s made my browsing experience a lot better.
Had recently upgraded to the pro package but glad to see much better value offered to Kagi customers across the board.
Great news! I was always getting nervously close to my 1000 every month, which made me use bangs more. Now I can just type in my query and not worry about it.
This service sounds perfect for me.
EDIT: Just finished the thread. In bed and the sleep-promoting substances are kicking in, but I set a reminder to sign up tomorrow.
