this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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Privacy

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Is anyone paying for Kagi, the search engine? What is your experience with it? (kagi.com)
submitted 2 days ago by Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com to c/privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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Kagi is a subscription-based search engine that argues that paying for search is a reasonable thing to do in order to avoid ads and companies selling your information. They also have lenses, e.g. for searching the fediverse specifically. Anyone that wants to share their experience of using Kagi?

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[–] XLE@piefed.social 66 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (4 children)

It'll be tough for you to find a middle of the road review of this, because people either pay a monthly subscription fee, and are aware of this, and use it because otherwise they'd be wasting their money... or they don't use, it and can't really contribute.

Personally, I've been turned off by it for a couple reasons:

  • I do not agree with their manifesto, which flies in the face of privacy and the dangers of the Filter Bubble

    And when you ask your own AI a question like "does God exist?" it will answer it relying on biases you preconfigured. When you ask it to recommend a good restaurant nearby, it will do so knowing what kind of food you like to eat. The same will happen when you ask it to recommend a good coffee maker - it will know the brands you like, your likely budget and the kind of coffee you usually drink. All this information will be volunteered to the AI by you...

  • The face of the company is rather weird
  • Subscription money goes to AI
  • It doesn't offer me sufficient value compared to free search engines that keep me anonymous by default.

ETA: If you use Kagi, don't rely on promises alone to keep your data private. Consider a masked email for login (you must provide one), and definitely use their Privacy Pass to keep your searches unlinked from your account instead.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 30 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) (1 children)

This is very similar to my experience.

I was a Kagi user for around 3 years, didn't really ran into issues looking up stuff, but also never really had to compare it with other search engines. I found answers to what I needed, and it was a passable answer. Don't need much else from a search engine.

I left when they started investing my money into muddying search with AI. Yes, you can turn it off. But that still means I get way less worth for what I pay, because instead of focusing the respurces on making a better search engine, they are focusing on AI.

I found out I'm ok with just using DDG or recently Ecosia. Both have AI, I can turn it off, but at least I'm not paying for it so IDC. In the case of Ecosia, at least they have a greenwashing twist as a bonus so I can feel better about myself, lol.

EDIT: Just to make it clear, I kind of trust Ecosia in their mission and I respect what their goal is, but I'm having a hard time trusting a company that adds an OpenAI-based chatbot to their site. They might've already changed it, but when they rolled it out and I saw the sentence "Ask our Ecosiabot about how to be more enviromental friendly" literally right under "This chat is subjected to OpenAI privacy policy" is so extremely ironic I lost a lot of trust in them. But still, at least they are trying to greenwash a bit.

[–] XLE@piefed.social 7 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Thanks for reminding me about Ecosia. I hadn't seen any of this, so I looked at their privacy policy and they actually refer to Mistral as if it is their exclusive provider:

LLM provider

We offer an AI-based chat service that allows you to have back and forth conversations on topics of your choice. If you use our chat service, queries will be sent to our model provider Mistral AI.

But then, much farther down, they mention OpenAI.

The provider we primarily use is Mistral AI... Ecosia may engage OpenAI as a backup service provider where Mistral is unavailable or a fallback is necessary to ensure continuity... You can find more information in OpenAI’s privacy policy. OpenAI will store your input and output data for 30 days for quality assurance purposes.

[–] Mikina@programming.dev 7 points 2 days ago

My issue is mostly with their claim "we want and have the service we provide energy neutral", vs " oh and we also use AI from companies that are using the power equivalent of a large city to power them".

Any enviromentaly conscious person should be against AI.

[–] Yingwu@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 points 2 days ago

Yeah, found out that the company and its founder sounds a bit.. interesting to say the least. Thanks for your input

[–] fux@piefed.social 1 points 1 day ago

That blog post was an interesting read. I didn't really like that kagi doesn't a offer a plan without any LLM but the handling of user data seems even worse.

[–] Aralakh@lemmy.ca 4 points 2 days ago

Wow I did not expect to enjoy reading that blog post as much as I did. This Vlad dude comes off like a petulant child.