I have recently started paying for Kagi (pronounced kah-gee), a paid privacy-focused search engine. It's honestly so nice to not have to weed through all of the ads, AI generated mush, and general quagmire of the SEO web. Because Kagi is directly supported by users, they are motivated to improve the user experience: no enshittification, at least not yet. You can read about their reasoning, but if you want a dollars-to-dollars comparison: I pay $10 a month for Kagi, Google would make on average $27 per month from me. Kagi searches are also 10× faster than Google, as they don't need to do all that extra stuff, just give you the results.
Kagi features:
- personalised results (higher/lower priority or block domains etc.)
- search 'lenses' to get only PDF results, or only academic results, etc. You can also set up custom lenses, e.g. I have one just for searching reddit.
- AI quick response, which I've found surprisingly useful (when used responsibly :) )
- uses the same bangs as duckduckgo to quickly search other sites (e.g. wikipedia with
!w)
I am currently searching about 50-100 times a day, which adds up to about half a cent per search. I think that's worth it. Honestly there's not much more to say here, except give it a crack with their free tier and see if you like it.
Outstanding Questions
- Exactly how much is this service worth to me? If they raise the price by $5/month, would I continue using it? It's hard to imagine going back to duckduckgo or google, but then search isn't that important.
- I have access to a couple of university AI chats, but if I didn't would the ultimate plan ($25/m) be worth trying?