Kagi Search - A Premium Search Engine
kagi.com
Kagi is an ad-free, premium search engine for people who value their time, attention and privacy. With results optimized to serve you and not the advertisers, Kagi is lightning fast and offers advanced features for customizing your search experience.

Basically the title.

I’m interested in any opportunity to inprove the way I navigate the internet. What I’ve been for a few years now is DDG, which works fine. Not great, not amazing, just fine. And that’s ok considering how they opperate.

I just heard about kagi and was really cosidering it. Makes sense as a business model (pay so we don’t have to sell you data), seems privacy respecting, and claims to strive for best search results in the market. Some test searches from the trial seem promising.

If you’ve used it for any amount of time, what has your experience been with it? What plan are you using? What are you mostly searching for?

Even you haven’t used it, any thoughts / opinions are welcome.

  •  Slotos   ( @Slotos@feddit.nl ) English
    24•1 year ago

    I’m weirded out by their “why need an account” explanation when Mullvad has a perfectly viable solution that doesn’t require one. “We don’t link your queries to you” is a vastly different claim from a “we can’t link your queries to you” one. Still, considering who we compare them to…

    On a personal note, Google search is so infuriatingly shitty lately that I’d been thinking about switching to another service. This does look to be worth a try.

      •  rog   ( @rog@lemmy.one ) English
        3•1 year ago

        DDG was great a few years ago and has steadily become shitter and shitter with time. Its still my default but I find myself banging to others more and more.

      •  Slotos   ( @Slotos@feddit.nl ) English
        2•1 year ago

        Mullvad can offer that because they generate you a one time access token that’s good until a certain time for a set number of simultaneous clients.

        Kagi could do a simpler version - an access token that’s good until a certain number of searches. In fact, they have that mostly built - the link they tell you to use in private sessions is literally it.

        Add to that anonymized payment options, and you got yourself a hard to track design.

  •  Earl Turlet   ( @EarlTurlet@lemmy.zip ) English
    15•1 year ago

    I’ve been using it for about a year and a half, on the unlimited plan. I pay for the year up front for the discount. There’s no way I’m willingly going to stop using Kagi. I’m a developer and perform about 2500 searches a month.

    The ability to adjust the ranking of domains and the lenses save me a ton of time. No other engine comes close to the productivity.

    You can easily talk to the developers and founder, too. I’ve had many of my suggestions actually implemented. It’s great when you pay for the service and they are in it for you, not your data.

  •  Spectacle8011   ( @Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space ) English
    14•1 year ago

    My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I’ve paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it’s great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi’s results pages are very light. It’s also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I’m de-ranking certain sites so they’re pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.

    There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.

    Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google’s API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.

    I’ve found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn’t handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.

      •  Spectacle8011   ( @Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space ) English
        3•1 year ago

        I briefly compare Mojeek to Brave here: https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/add-mojeek/12101/2

        Pros for Brave Search:

        • (Kind of) uses its own index for general results! Their indexing strategy is somewhat odd, but this is miles better than most of the other “search engines” listed here: https://www.searchenginemap.com
        • Optionally premium. Users can pay to remove ads, improving the user experience. A monetization strategy that aligns with searcher’s interests.

        Cons for Brave Search:

        • Image search is heavily based on Bing, as far as I know. You’ll have to correct me on this one.
        • Javascript required for certain primary parts of the SERP (Search Engine Result Page), like Image and Video results.
        • Adding onto that, their SERPs are a lot heavier than Kagi and Mojeek, but nowhere near as bad as Duckduckgo.

        Mojeek aligns far more with what I want out of a search engine. They are completely independent; they don’t even use the servers of big companies like AWS or Google Cloud! They use a local datacenter instead. I think it’s cool that their image search is specially designed for finding freely usable images (Creative Commons/Public Domain licensed), rather than relying on Bing Images. They also have a focus on the “smaller web” and independent creators—see their most recent blog post, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/06/search-content-from-substacks-independent-writers.html

        Their staff are clearly very passionate about what they do and very knowledgeable. I trust them a lot, through personal conversations I’ve had with them. I just don’t have that same trust for Brave Search, as well as my usability problems with it.

        Lastly, I’ve learned a lot of interesting stuff from Mojeek about search. Their blog is very interesting, even if you don’t use their search engine. I really liked this one, for example: https://blog.mojeek.com/2023/05/generative-ai-threatens-diversity-and-hyperlinks.html

          •  Spectacle8011   ( @Spectacle8011@lemmy.comfysnug.space ) English
            3•1 year ago

            If you’re using a desktop browser, I recommend adding search engines directly to the browser. In Firefox, this is easy because all you need to do is click the URL bar and hit “Add [Search Engine]”. And then you can add keywords to them which allows you to search them directly.

            So, when I search for something on Wikipedia, rather than using a bang to go through Brave or Kagi, I just do @w query, because @w is my shortcut for Wikipedia in Firefox.

            It’s especially useful for someone like me who uses a lot of different search engines, but it’s also faster and takes out the middle-man. If you’re using a non-iPhone non-Firefox mobile browser though, this isn’t really something you can do (yet).

    •  glad_cat   ( @glad_cat@lemmy.sdf.org ) English
      7•1 year ago

      Same experience here. I tried Kagi when I got a new job and I thought that having a good search engine would be beneficial to me. It is indeed the best search engine I’ve ever used and I won’t stop using it.

      The issues because there are some: it’s a bit expensive (but I gain at least 1 hour every day as I am not struggling with shitty results from Google), and the “privacy” of your searches cannot be proved once and for all even if they swear they don’t store anything.

  •  acow   ( @acow@programming.dev ) English
    6•1 year ago

    My trials of it always seem outstanding, but the price with search limits has thus far discouraged me from signing up every time I think to do so. $5 for 10k searches (or some number that I wouldn’t have to think about as a human user searching for things) would get me over the fence. Even the family plan with up to 2 users seems stingy.

  •  Freeman   ( @freeman@lemmy.pub ) English
    5•1 year ago

    I was chatting about it yesterday here in this thread

    https://lemmy.pub/post/77321

    • I use the 10/month plan with a $5.0 soft limit and a $10 hard limit, though I have yet to exceed my plan quota at all.

    • I have used it since hearing about it on HN a couple months ago during one of the DDG controversies.

    • Its completely replaced my search engine. I use it on my work machines, personal machines and phone for all searching.

    • Most searches are probably work related ie: Systems Admin, “Devops” (depending on your definition of the term), Security etc etc but also random thoughts. Heck today i was searching for flounder lights on it.

    • I generally find I have to refine searches less often, and rarely do I need to use bangs to pipe a search to DDG. I have had co-workers mention in recent months that they are always amazed that I will find very relevant sources fairly quickly, often ones that they cant get a front page hit on even when looking for it because i mentioned it. Though that may speak more to how I structure searches already since Kagi is fairly new to me.

    • I use the filters/lenses quite often. The recipes one is awesome for a lot of the cooking/smoking I do. Programming is solid too.

    • I would NOT reccomend this for general use yet unless it has a specific value add, such as with me and work. For example my wife still uses DDG (because i put her on it) and probably google on work devices or something. Its fine for her and thus for me. I would only reccomend it if you happen to work in a specific field that has a TON of crap sourcing/junk articles that are SEO gamed (ie: Tech) or you specifically align with the privacy ideology.

    • the account thing is only for stripe for billing for now, they go have a greyed out and unchecked box enable query history. I have seen it mentioned you can use a totally fake email to sign up (since it doesnt necessarily require verification) though the owner has recommended against it for obvious reasons. Adding crypto options brings baggage, I think he just tied it to stripe to the ease of billing/use.

  •  Crazyfrog   ( @Crazyfrog@discuss.tchncs.de ) English
    4•1 year ago

    I have not properly tested it, however I had a look at their sample queries. One of which was Steve Jobs, the main thing I noticed was that three of the top 5-10 results were the Wikipedia page for Steve jobs but in different languages. I appreciate that Google isn’t great but it’s not bad enough to serve you the same page three times. I personally use searxng.

  •  Midas   ( @midas@ymmel.nl ) English
    4•1 year ago

    I was considering it (having previously tested the now defunct Neeva) but the to me limited amount of searches is really stopping me from giving it a go.

  •  sky   ( @sky@codesink.io ) English
    3•1 year ago

    My partner and I have been using the family plan for a couple months now and have been extremely happy with it. It’s replaced all search on desktop and mobile.

    We’re usually searching for programming and devops related information, world and political news, and then local businesses and contractors, that sort of stuff.

  •  barf   ( @barf@kbin.social ) 
    3•1 year ago

    I’ve been using Kagi since their public beta, and paying for it has been a no brainer. For programming related searches it isn’t even comparable to Google, as there are very little/no SEO spam re-post garbage sites (like the ones that just scrape and reformat GitHub issues or stack overflow questions). And if there are, I block those domains and never see them again. For all other searches, I have the same experience of better results with less garbage.

    The lack of ads has many great advantages, somewhat obviously. Results load faster, my pihole doesn’t break anything, I can see the top result immediately, I never click a sponsored result on accident, etc. I don’t really use many of the advanced features like lenses or GPT functionality and still feel like I get my moneys worth every single month.

  •  barf   ( @barf@kbin.social ) 
    3•1 year ago

    I’ve been using Kagi since their public beta, and paying for it has been a no brainer. For programming related searches it isn’t even comparable to Google, as there are very little/no SEO spam re-post garbage sites (like the ones that just scrape and reformat GitHub issues or stack overflow questions). And if there are, I block those domains and never see them again. For all other searches, I have the same experience of better results with less garbage.

    The lack of ads has many great advantages, somewhat obviously. Results load faster, my pihole doesn’t break anything, I can see the top result immediately, I never click a sponsored result on accident, etc. I don’t really use many of the advanced features like lenses or GPT functionality and still feel like I get my moneys worth every single month.