this post was submitted on 22 May 2026
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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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[–] 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.