> mthadley_

Two Years of Kagi

I started paying for Kagi back in 2023, and while I briefly alluded to my usage of their service last year, I’ve yet to write up my thoughts after remaining a customer. With my two year subscription-versary coming up, now seems as good a time as any.

Search Like You Remember It

Kagi ostensibly exists to be a non-enshittified Google and in my experience succeeds in that purpose. I buy their marketing that removing perverse incentives from ad revenue and replacing it with a subscription fee unburdens them to focus on a friendly search experience.

Having no ads in search results is potentially worth paying for on its own, despite being somewhat undercut by DuckDuckGo, who will let you disable advertisements for free. For example, a search for “Ford” on Kagi had the automaker right at the top, with Google nearly having it nearly below the fold underneath a mountain of sponsored results. Yikes.

The quality of those search results are certainly no worse than other competitors, if not partly because they often come from the same place. In reality, the results are better thanks to features like customizable rankings; I haven’t seen a W3Schools link in ages after lowering its ranking. This might be Kagi’s killer feature for me.

New Ideas

While Kagi does offer their version of the controversial “AI Search Summary”, you won’t see it unless you ask for it. I think the activation method of appending a question mark to your query is clever, such as “What does IMF stand for?”. I do use them when I know there’s a short, well-known answer and I don’t want to click through some random site to get it.

Lenses are a cool idea, though I have mixed feelings about them. I use the “Forum” lense all the damn time, but if I’m honest, it feels like a glorified shortcut for site:reddit.com. Otherwise, I don’t feel like I’m missing much by sticking with “All” results.

Bangs are great too. They aren’t unique to Kagi, but Kagi has a great implementation. Append !i to your query to search for images, !yt for YouTube results, or my favorite, a lone ! to skip the search page entirely and go straight to the first result. The latter feels like a feature you’d never see from Google who needs you to see their search page or else their business model falls apart.

Complaints

In general, I’m a happy Kagi customer and I have no plans to switch back to a free search provider like Google (or more likely, DuckDuckGo). However, I do have a few minor complaints.

In addition to search, Kagi has been releasing a gaggle of other adjacent products: Translations, Maps, AI chat, and even a browser. I can certainly understand the strategy of trying to replicate any missing features that may lead users back to a competitor like Google, but they come across as half-baked. Kagi feels like the product of a small team, so I worry about their ability to be competitive in all of these areas, when all I really want from them is the best paid search that I can buy.

Kagi is certainly proud of their search speed, and while I feel it is generally adequate, Google still renders faster for me. Occasionally there will be notable delay of up to a few seconds before I see Kagi’s results (maybe waiting on upstream search result provider APIs), with Google consistently feeling instantaneous. Admittedly, the end-to-end experience is still in Kagi’s favor, as I don’t need to mentally filter out invasive ad results.

Honestly, I don’t know! For most people, probably not. Unless you’re like me, on a computer 8 hours a day, constantly interacting with a search engine, I think you are not likely to see the money as well spent.

However, if you’re at all sick of the Google’s new status quo, you may as well give their free trial a test drive.