Technology

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.

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.

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%.

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

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

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

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.

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

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?

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) 👍

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 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.

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.

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 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’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.

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.

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

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:

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'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 quite enjoy Qwant

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.

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.