Is Kagi search engine worth it?

Been using Kagi for over a year and it's gotten to the point where I forget I'm using it, which is peak search engine for me. Not sure I agree with their big new focus being AI and a browser, but as a $5/month search engine it's perfect.

I ran through the 300 query limit in about a day; $5 month isn't really practical imo
- I was just looking at my usage actually and I never go above 100 in a month. I have to use work provided search and AI for work so that keeps the number down. That sucks, $5 is kind of the most I like to spend on any non critical subscription per month

Just had a conversation about this. I'll copypasta what I said there.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

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.

Thank you, very interesting post. I've interacted with Vlad before, he's very unhinged. I'm just using Kagi for a good time, not a long time.
I'm ready to jump off at the first whiff of them using my data for something funny, but I do really really like the idea of having a search engine that works this good and doesn't show me ads or sell my data, I'm allergic to both. Searxng results were complete garbage on all instances I've tried.
Also DDG is a perfectly viable option.
Thanks for sharing this, very informative read. I might have to go through that Cohost article when I have a spare hour haha
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

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.
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 A anywhere 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.

Kagi gave me weird hype vibes like Private Internet Access. Very cult-sounding/ hard to tell what's a paid advert when everyone is so rabidly opinionated and it's a bit of a niche to begin with.

I've tried it since then and it's actually very good. I've used DuckDuckGo for years and 30% of my searches go to google for a second opinion. With Kagi, that number is more like 10-20%. It's designed with users in mind and actually helps you find things not by actively subverting your will, but my giving you tools to build better queries and better results.

I'm still trying to reconcile my thoughts about FOSS and such but the results are the closest I've found to early Google. I don't care much for AI, but I used it to accurately identify an unknown wire connector on a cable I found and the model of a keyboard someone was selling in classifieds and didn't actually list in the description (this one took a few tries).

I've decided for now I'm going to put them in the same category as some of the stuff Louis Rossman is involved in which also isn't the perfect FOSS licence though its in the direction of freedom.

I stopped paying for Kagi a few years ago when they decided to introduce even more AI features than they had at the time. So I now run my own SearXNG instance. Fast, good and no AI in it. Just search results.

You know you could just disable all its LLM features? that's the beauty of kagi
- I don't want my money to go into a company that praises LLMs.

Personally, Kagi is worth it for me because I've grown to rely on its features (lenses, domain ranking, Wolfram Alpha integration, fast response times), and I've not been able to get the same quality of results from free alternatives (SearXNG included).

That said, if you're not a heavy search user, or you're happy with the results from free search providers, then it probably won't be much use to you over something like DuckDuckGo.

Regarding the AI integrations, I've not found them intrusive personally. Admittedly, I like their (optional) translation tool and (also optional) quick answers even though they're both LLM-based.

If you want the meta search functionality, you should try out SearXNG, which is basically self hosted poor man's Kagi lol

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%.

Thanks for describing the research assistant. Hopefully ddg copies this
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.
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.

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.
- I think it's valid to boycott Russian companies, or any companies that supports them. Justifying it to be the best search engine doesn't necessarily make it right. And yet I still have a paid Kagi subscription, but I don't blame people who don't, and think their use of Yandex should be more obvious.

I've been using Kagi for more than 2 years and I'm very happy with it. It gets me great results quickly and zero ads. Sometimes I use their AI to grab a bunch of data I'd have to collect myself.

My main complaint is grabbing images with them for specific resolutions they just give up or add AI slop at the end. To be very clear, it's amazing at finding 4k images 3840x2160. But if I flip that aspect ratio it starts to suck. That's like... Hella niche but still important to mention.

It's the best alternative I've found to the majority of options, besides self-hosting and I'm not doing that yet so I can't comment on if it's worth it or not.

I'm not paying for a search engine. Duck Duck Go for everyday usage. Yandex when I'm looking for media.

Yeah, no way do I need another subscription in my life when there’s a suitable substitute.

I am open to the idea of paying for quality services that put the customer first. Hell, I pay for my email and have done so for years.

But Kagi has always squicked me out a bit. Some of their business practices over the years have been rather questionable, especially their push into AI which is exactly the sort of thing someone looking at Kagi would probably want to avoid. They are also very expensive. They're one of those services that just assumes everyone is American so they just give a $ cost and don't specify beyond that, so I'm going to assume their prices are in USD which means a plan for my dad and myself is $21CAD a month. That absurdly overpriced for a search engine subscription.

To put that into perspective: A YouTube premium family plan covers up to 6 accounts and is the same price and includes unlimited video and music streaming. Thoughts about YouTube aside and looking at this from a pure value perspective, paying that same price just for a search engine is a godawful shit deal. Do you know what my email costs per month? $1.25CAD

Where do you get email? Mine is about $4 US a month but I don't like it much.
- I'm with Posteo.

Highly recommend giving this blog post that takes a little bit of a deep dive into Kagi.

https://xn--gckvb8fzb.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 pay for it. Finding good results in the first page saves me time and I enjoy the optional AI filters and domain-based weighting.

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.

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.

I think that you submitted the wrong URL. The submitted URL just points to Kagi's home page (https://kagi.com/), not to an article talking about the Orion browser.

You’re 100% right, I corrected the title, thank you
- Oh, okay, I didn't realize that you were trying to just ask people here about their search engine, rather than link to an article about Orion.
  Well, I use Kagi's search engine. They basically do what I wish Google and YouTube and suchlike would do --- just make their money by charging a fee and providing a service, rather than trying to harvest data and show ads. I use search more than any other service online, and there isn't really a realistic way for me to run my own Web-spanning search engine and getting reasonable, private results. I don't really make use of most of their add-on features other than their "Fediverse Forums" thing that can search all Threadiverse hosts, which is helpful, and occasionally their Usenet search functionality. My principal interest in them is from a privacy standpoint, and I'm happy with them on that front; they don't log or data-mine.
  EDIT: They do have some sort of way to issue searches without telling Kagi which user at Kagi you are, if you're worried about them secretly retaining your search results anyway, which I think is technically interesting, but I really don't care that much. If a wide range of websites adopted the system, that'd be interesting, maybe.
  EDIT2: Privacy Pass. Might be the protocol of the same name that CloudFlare uses. I've never really dug into it.
  EDIT3: Some of their functionality (user-customizable search bangs, for example) can also be done browser-side, if your browser supports it and you rig it up that way. Like, I had Firefox set up to make "!gm <query>" do a Google Maps search before Kagi did, and chuckled when I realized that they defaulted to the same convention that I had.
  EDIT4: Oh, their images search does let you view a proxied view of the image (so that the site with the result doesn't know that you're viewing the image) and lets one save the image. IIRC, Google Images used to do something like that, though I don't believe they do now, so places like pinterest that try to make saving an image a pain are obnoxious. Firefox on the desktop still lets one save any image visible on a webpage (click the lock icon in the URL bar, click "Connection Secure", click "More Information", click "Media", and then scroll through the list until you find the image in question), but I'd just as soon not jump through the hoops, and Kagi just eliminates the whole headache.
  EDIT5: They try to identify and flag paywalled sites in their results, unlike Google. For example, if you kagi for "the economist American policy is splitting, state by state, into two blocs", you'll get a result with a little dollar sign icon. This can be helpful, though archive.today will let one effectively bypass many paywalls, which somewhat reduces the obnoxiousness of getting paywalled results just mixed in with non-paywalled results on Google.
- Your title still says "Kagy" instead of "Kagi".

I'm a fan. It took me a few weeks of properly rating (raising, lowering, and blocking) to get truly customized results. Once I did though, I found I'm able to research far faster than before. I've also become a fan of their AI assistant. It has multiple llm's to choose from and is more private than using them directly.

Yes. One of the few subscriptions I have no qualms about.

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
- 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.
- 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.
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.

I’m running a local SearXNG which still provides usable results. I don’t see the point in paying for what’s basically a smart phone book. If everything fails, I’m going full #oldweb and use #webrings or some of those retro lists.

Yes absolutely. The results are actually useful, they don't have an incentive to keep you from finding what you are searching for. There is way less copywritten content and if there is, you can just block it.

Whenever I have to go back to "free" alternatives I am shocked by how much worse it is.

Personally, it's the only search engine I haven't wanted to get away from

I tried it, and liked it, but stopped using it based on cost. If it was open source or somehow contributed to the open web, I would continue paying for it.

I went searching for a new search engine. I tried SearXNG, but I wasn't impressed with the results. So now I use duckduckgo and ecosia, because if I have to indirectly use google, at least I can get some trees planted in the process.

IIRC Ecosia and DDG use Bing as their backend, not Google.

With DuckDuckGo around it is hard to justify paying for Kagi personally.

... How did you mispell the name of the service in the thread title?

Aside from that: I think so, but you need to make that decision for yourself. There are a few demos that various influencers have made (I was sold by the one by Remap Radio... Fuck Capitalism, Go Home, and Pay For Google?) but what sold me is:

I do a LOT of searching in any given month. I'll use an LLM based "engine" for quick factoids (we'll get back to that) but I really need the ability to search from my browser's address bar or the steam browser without having to wade through all the bullshit.
I REALLY like that I can prioritize, deprioritize, and outright block sites. No need for a sketchy anti-fandom extension that tracks everything I do when I can just click the dots and say to never show me warframe.fandom ever again. Also it is useful for blocking the REALLY chuddy news sites and misinformation blogs
Speaking of Steam. I can just grab/assemble my login-less search string and use that with Steam so that all my in-game searches use kagi with my token rather than dealing with raw dogging google.
And as for that LLM? While I wouldn't pay for it on its own, I do like the kagi assistant. Mostly because it shows me what search strings it is running/emulating and gives me citations. So when it tells me that smallpox tastes savory, I can see how it came to that conclusion and even check if that is contradicted by the website it linked to

I have a lot of concerns with the techbro libertarian attitude of the company itself and am not really huge with where my money goes (in terms of API calls) but... I have a lot more concerns with google shoving and obfuscating gemini more every single day.

Do I like that I am paying for what should be a basic fundamental element of the internet? Of course not. But also... kagi's approach kinda feels like what searching always should have been since it lets me cut through the SEO bullshit so effectively. I doubt I would be paying for this if google et al hadn't all decided it was better to emphasize advertisements and LLMs over all else but... I also could see myself doing so with the right demo?

Yes

Buy an ad.

Imagine trying to advertise anything on the Fediverse 🌚
However this only made Mojeek more appealing

I quite enjoy Qwant

It's one of those organic produce items among the Internet things which happens to be in vogue these days.

Mullvad Leta is the way

For anyone curious how well it works, I just noticed they have a trial:

https://kagi.com/pricing

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.

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.