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With DuckDuckGo around it is hard to justify paying for Kagi personally.
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%.
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.
Do you have an example of this you can provide verbatim?
I’m just curious; I think the one application LLMs might actually be viable for is exactly this kind of connection finding in a large corpus, and since I’m doing lots of research, I might actually find personal utility.
DuckDuckGo pro is $10 a mo but you get advanced model, on top of vpn and other crap.
Could not have said it better myself. After my trial ended, I realized I was just going to pony up for it. It has probably saved me so much time when I’m doing my own little rabbit hole shenanigans at 2 in the morning when I should have been sleeping 4 hours ago.
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.
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 reading and I liked the suggestions.
I also liked the “reminder”.
Edit: you should share this in some community as a post, every time I see this kind of website (pure content no-nonsense) it is shared is in the comments. 15 years ago this kind of stuff was easy to find, but nowadays, I only see them in comment sections. Even the search engine recommended around here would list a bunch of junk in the first pages.
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.
Hey, Good job not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good.
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.
The AI assistant is backed by several different models which IIRC just call out to those providers (Op*nAI API, etc) and rack up tokens in the billing system:
You might be right that the AI cost is included when below the plan price — to that I have to say, give me a fucking cheaper plan that doesn’t implicitly include the cost of AI.Ask/vote for it there, will be useful for others
What specifically do you think is hard to avoid? I’ve never accidentally triggered a quick answer, personally
As far as I can tell, you have to completely disable all keyboard shortcuts or else when you press
Aanywhere that isn’t the search box you get dumped immediately into their AI assistant prompted with whatever you already had in the search bar.It didn’t track me more than a few pennies, but on principle the several times that happened made me angry.
Apparently some of the news views in search are also easy to dump you into AI land. There’s community CSS add on that hides all that stuff now, but I wish the company would let me just disable the AI traps.
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.
For anyone curious how well it works, I just noticed they have a trial:
No, it’s just trading one centralized search product that is free and profits by using your data and manipulating you, for another that you have to pay for and profits from you more directly but still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding. Run your own decentralized SearXNG instead and take it into your own hands. Search isn’t something that should be controlled by anyone who’s in it for a profit.
still has financial incentive to keeping you engaged and searching instead of finding
How so
Up-selling and cross-selling. It’s just business. Who’s ever going to pay $25/month if the $5/month plan does everything anyone ever possibly needs? Their lowest level pricing model relies on making you anxious about running out of searches eventually, not finding everything you need within that window each month, and not having effective enough tools to find what you need at the basic level. You may personally reject that you need anything more than the basic plan, but the company’s financial incentive is to convince you of the opposite, and don’t think for a second that they’re not eventually going to try to convince you that you need to upgrade. It may seem like $5/month and $25/month are not that far apart, but multiply that across some arbitrary number of users, say, 100,000, and you’re talking about $2 million dollars PER MONTH of potential revenue on the table. And there’s no guarantee they’re not going to eventually start pushing even more expensive products and plans.
They have partnerships with other businesses too, and while those seem like nice enough businesses on the surface, they’re still businesses and they are going to have motivation to find ways to drive traffic and prime you to get subscriptions to them too. The problem is not that these partnerships exist or that there’s anything wrong with them, it’s that they’re another corrupting influence when money is involved and changing hands.
To be clear, I’m not saying anyone involved is evil, that they’re actively doing this now, that they are even necessarily moving in this direction, or that they’re even slightly corrupt at all… yet, but they’re swimming in the corrupting waters of subscription-based dark patterns and they can’t help but be influenced by them. The lust for profits will inevitably drive them mad. It always does. Enshittification does not make exceptions for good intentions.
Yeah, this is not the case as they run on a subscription based model.
I used Kagi for a while. I stopped because it’s prohibitively expensive, and rather than prioritizing lowering prices they kept giving me AI features I did not want at all - hell, it’s the kind of shit I was paying to get away from. Mix direct support for Russian companies into the mix, and you have an expensive AI fueled multi-purpose web monstrosity that supports war crimes. No thanks. I just wanted a search engine.
Their search results were good though. I wouldn’t mind supporting a subscription based model, but I’m sick and tired of tech bros and their bullshit.
Why would you conclude that a subscription based model makes them immune from corrupt financial incentives? Quite the opposite. That’s my whole point.
“If you’re not paying, you are the product”
Nobody offers services for free, the money has to come from somewhere
Well, yeah, they’re run by a corporation, which I guess means they need to show infinite growth to return value to stockholders. If so they can keep growing on subscriptions for a while, but eventually they’ll turn on their customers. So fair enough.
I think that’s part of my problem with them honestly. They seem to always want to grow and do more, but I would rather have seen them focus on search and make the subscription more affordable. But as they need growth I guess that’s not possible.
You still haven’t explained the incentive, just postured that it must exist.
Every SearXNG instance I’ve tested has been terrible for my test queries. Any chance you can account for that?
Up until a few weeks ago I was running my own private SearXNG instance and it’s not just you, even I noticed on my OWN instance that it had progressively gotten worse. Initially it was great so I just left it be but then the performance and results just became horrible. It was hit or miss if the thing would even load or not when other instances on my server like my akkoma, piefed, redlib, forgejo, etc all ran smooth as silk.
Eventually I ditched SearXNG and switched to 4get which much better and faster results. thing never goes down and the search results have been fantastic.
Did you change something at the settings? Searxng is just as good as the source it’s using.
They weren’t my instances. There are some public instances floating around so, before trying to self host, I gave them a shot. I can’t remember the specifics well. For me to bother investing time testing, I may have had a query that was irritating me on Duck Duck Go and Google so it might not have been a particularly fair test
I’d like to use SearXNG as well but experience the same - I’ve tried a lot of different instances and settings but I always seem to get worse results than searching directly in the source search engine, for some reason? (note I don’t use Kagi so this isn’t an endorsement for them either)
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.
Feels like this is an add, but in case it’s not, I use crypto to pay the lowest rate plan and this keeps me anonymous. I really like it but would strongly advise against giving a search provider your personal info which you have to do if paying by credit card. Its a much different thing having your searches linked to an IP vs your cc, name and home address.
Do you then need to buy the crypto anonymously? I’m always confused about that point
You can but I don’t. You pay the crypto to Kagi through a third party pay service. Its not 100% untraceable but it’s enough to keep you out of any automated tracking that Kagi is or will eventually be doing.
You can buy it anonymously, mostly through P2P exchanges and markets. But simply buying bitcoin or some other popular coin with fiat, then exchanging that to Monero and using that to buy your privacy things will work as well.
Monero is very private and anonymous.
Thanks! My barrier to using crypto has been this first purchase element. Because afaik crypto is not inherently pvt and anon?
I quite enjoy Qwant
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.
Mullvad Leta is the way
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.
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Yes
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.
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!
Yeah no im with the above user on this one. I have used kagi for over a year now and have never needed to use another search engine to find something
Same here.
Finding actual answers or at least able to point me in the right direction is way better than any of the other search engines I’ve tried.
DDG, Google, Bing, SearchNX, Ecosia, Brave, and probably some more, they just aren’t even in the same ball field for the things I look up personally.
Also DDG is a perfectly viable option.
