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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yeah, found out that the company and its founder sounds a bit… interesting to say the least. Thanks for your input
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.
- I do not agree with their manifesto, which flies in the face of privacy and the dangers of the Filter Bubble
I don’t know why Kagi would be shilled in the Privacy community when they don’t seem to actually understand privacy… They claim to be privacy focused out of one side of their mouth, while asking for more and more information from the user to allow their AI features to work out of the other side. They apparently resolve this in their own head by just claiming that any information you voluntarily give to them isn’t private information.
They give you a free trial (no CC required) so just give it a try for yourself.
Its the least bad option. AFAIK no one else even offers paid search, much less ones that allow you to block sources, or limit your search to “the small web”.
No, there’s other paid search engines, the others just look like they are from the pre-iPod era and have suboptimal spiders
Been using kagi for 4 months and just renewed as a paid subscriber. Just want to mention things I haven’t seen mentioned yet but this is not an exhaustive list:
– you can get a discount through kagi specials. I think I paid for a year of Ente ($40 bucks or so) and got three months of Kagi free. Maybe the other way around through Ente but they have other partners as well
– the AI is a problem for many which is understandable. I have found its implementation sane and opt-in only. The addition of AI did not affect the cost of the subscription (they get their cut from a 20% increase over the API cost apparently). A recent Kagi Feedback thread suggests they will be restructuring subscriptions into pure search and pure AI at some point along with a combined plan in the future though TBD. They’ve kind of backed themselves in a corner as it seems like half the userbase wants nothing to do with AI and the other half sees its removal as a feature previously added at no extra cost being removed and thus a value loss to their sub. They’ve said in the past their search is FAR more expensive than AI (which is why it was added for free) but that seems to contradict some of their recent statements about the restructuring.
– Kagi Translate is great, obviously LLM based but machine translation is kind of what LLMs are for and it is an easy replacement for google translate
– Kagi Maps is rolling out slowly and should have apps at some point which would be a huge win for leaving gmaps
– I have actually found their universal summarizer pretty nice for getting a preview of articles or YouTube videos, seems like it can also crawl behind pay walls
– I will sometimes mindlessly scroll the Small Web index which is a very cool little project offered for free
– they have a no log policy on search but allow you to take it a step farther via privacy pass which allows you to log in via an anonymous token if you want to ensure your account it not tied to a specific search (I am no cyber security expert but I’ve read its a legit implementation)
In summary, Kagi sometimes gets a chronic case of startup brain and I get the uneasiness around some of their incorporation of AI. At the same time I have found basically all of their tools useful to some degree and I easily get 10 dollars of value out of the sub a month.
Great write-up.
Despite my concerns, if I could purchase a subscription that was free of AI investment, I think I might.
Despite how pro-AI their ownership is, imo they have the least intrusive AI options of any search I’ve used, free or not
Thanks, you are definitely not alone there. I hope they make an offering like this soon as there is clearly demand for it.
Love it. Any time I’m forced to go back to something like DDG, it now feels absolutely painful.
I pay for it, like $100 or so a year. I don’t use any of the AI features, just the search. The search results are great, better than Google. I’m happy with it.
that’s a lot of money tbh
Yeah, but I heard that is way less than google makes from personal information, per person per year.
Possibly, I don’t mean it in a way of " you’re stupid for paying"-way, its just too much money for most people
Oh no, I am not disagreeing with you. I was perfectly happy with startpage and ddg, until I have less time to scroll over ad and a bit more money to spend.
I just want to put the price into perspective. I agree that people should be financially responsible and use the free solution when they don’t have the cash.
That being said, some people around me have an openAI/claude subscription that is way more expensive. And that makes me feel slightly better about where my money is going to.
The free trial lasted me 2 months. I then bought the year subscription and have been evangelizing Orion to all the iPhone-users in my friend group and my family. This is the only subscription I am willing to pay for.
Really, when you pay for Kagi most of the money actually is supporting the development of the Orion browser. I eagerly await the release of the Linux version of Orion. It’s like Brave, but without any of the crypto bullshit that keeps me from reccomending Brave to people.
Random 2-year-old article that assumes to instruct me on what I shouldn’t do immediately in the title must be right.
thank goodness that the title of an article is usually followed by some more words!
I did chuckle at the end, where they really felt the need to drive in a second, “Do not use Kagi.”
Personally, I haven’t, but someone I follow posted about it some days ago:
https://explains.social/users/veronica/statuses/01KS2VC1E0W1AVHJQETGX44X8T
I have used it for more than a year, I enjoy it. I also pay for email if that tells you the kinda person I am.
I care more about trying to not give google data willingly whenever I can.
Easiest $10 per month for me.
Yup, and it has been great. In terms of time saved and general result quality for what I do, it’s worth it to me.
For years now, and that article floating around about not being to google “disregard” anymore (because it breaks the AI) may have me switching to a Duo package soon.
The results are great. Lenses and personalized results are well worth the $10 on their own. Privacy pass is (IMO) a priceless insurance policy.
I have subscribed for two separate months before, when doing a project that involved a lot of research.
I always cancelled after the project was done, because of their stance on privacy. They clearly pretend to be privacy focused, but you need to provide an email and their privacy policy didnt even meet the legal bare minimum in the EU up until a month or so ago, which is just embarasing. Yes, they have that privacy pass thing, but then it blocks like half the features that make kagi good so I didnt use it much.
Been paying for it for probably two years now. It’s not a silver bullet for how supremely fucked the entire web is but it’s much nicer than anything else I’ve tried. It does what I ask and, more importantly it doesn’t do what I don’t ask.
