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.

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%.

… 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:

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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?

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.

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.

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?

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.

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

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

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.

Some people like them, they do have at least some ties to a Russian company which is a no from me at the moment.