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Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.
Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:
- Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
- “Lenses”, which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
- All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type “!yt” in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
- Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more
This blog post goes into full details about Kagi’s capabilities.
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I’m intrigued, but I don’t want to login to a search engine :/
100% this. I’m willing to pay for searches, but I’m not willing to get myself tracked and pay for the privilege.
If they did some sort of microtransaction thing, like send a small amount of monero, get a couple searches for a session. That work for me. Then it would be completely ephemeral.
If they worked out a deal with mullvad where connections from all that get low priority searches, that would also work. Cuz I trust movad to be an intermediary to obscure the payer from the search.
If you could pay them and get an onion URL, for your paid searches. It’s not perfect, but it would at least break the connection between the payer and the searches. Though it’s more bulky and easier to correlate multiple searches to a single person at least would be a start.
Does Kagi support languages outside of English? One issue I have with DDG is the lack of results outside English sites. If Kagi is similar then it would be a big issue.
EDIT BEINGS HERE
So I actually watched a talk by the person who coinded “enshittification”, Cory Doctorow, recently, and I have changed my perspective about Kagi. I no longer think Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
Enshittification requires advertisers. As long as Kagi finances itself with money that does not come from advertisers, it will not enshittify.
This does not mean that it’s not problematic that their code is closed-source.
EDIT ENDS HERE
I like what I hear about the user experience, but there are many problems I see with the service.
For one, it’s based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification. Currently, it is giving users loads of stuff so that users use it, but sooner or later investors will want their money back and Kagi will enshittify.
Finally, these two problems would be mitigated by open-sourcing and making libre their software. With that, alternatives in more sensible legislatures could open. Users could migrate to instances that are still libre and not enshittified.
It is really unfortunate that Kagi is doing so many things well while doing some fundamental things terribly. As it stands, Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
For one, it’s based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
https://kagi.com/privacy at least sounds pretty good.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification.
https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round this sound good as well.
The part that I don’t get is how they can match Google in terms of search results quality when Microsoft couldn’t even get close with Bing and a heck of a lot more time and money.
Easy. Kagi cares about the quality of their product giving you the customer good results. Their product is a search engine. Google doesn’t care to make their search engine better currently. Their product is ad placement and sales. You are not their customer.
Kagi already exceeds Google at being a search engine, at this time.
Don’t think you will find a better search engine than Kagi. They can’t even see what queries users are running, according to their own comments.
That’d be weird if they couldn’t, there’s no way they can improve their search engine other than by watching the way users use it.
Otherwise it exists in a vacuum.
This is fantastic. I’ve been a $5 Kagi user for a few months and have been really enjoying it. The only issue has been that sometimes when I’m working on a project I need to blow through a ton of similar queries to find what I’m looking for; I’ve been forced to switch back to google for those. Now I’ve upgraded and am going full Kagi.
That’s a curious project and I hope they succeed. But I have to wonder. On their “Why pay for search engines” page, they state the following:
Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search itself has a non-zero cost. In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches (wherever in the world you search from). So a user searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3 in search cost. But an average Kagi user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use.
So, will they dial the price back up or do they currently just hope that most people pay for the “unlimited searches per month” plan but use it less than an average user would?
Their operations are very small scale still. I imagine as the economy of scale does its thing, that price/search will fall drastically.
Does anyone have experience with non-english searches? Are the results of similar quality?
Why on earth would I pay $10 a month for search when I can get everything I need using SearXNG? For Free.
It costs me exactly $0.00 to run SearXNG locally using Podman and WSL to host the docker image. It Just Works; and I don’t have to worry about paying money every month to anyone; nor do I ever have to count my search queries as precious.
Unfortunately this “$10/month = Unlimited” is also likely to be available only for a limited time; and once Kagi feels it has enough users; then you’ll be stuck back on some arbitrary number of searches each month.
Worse is logging in. To search. Yuck.
There are so many “Public” SearXNG instances as well for the less-than-technical; https://searx.space/
All of them provide the option(s) to use whatever engines you’d like.
Kagi has better search results than any other engine I’ve used. That is why people pay for it.
No it doesn’t. SearXNG aggregates all engines anyways; and that gets far more helpful results.
This is literally “nuh uh” quality discussion. We get it, you like SearXNG, are you actually trying Kagi?
I just tried a few SearXNG instances and the quality is the same as what I get from Google or Bing anyways.
Trying out Kagi now to see if it’s better or not.
@douglasg14b @fwygon I love Kagi. For technical topics, the search quality is unparalleled. For everything else it’s about the same.
Yeah, it’s technical topics I care about, and have a hard time with in current search engines.
There is so much noise caused by celebrity news, current events, “hot topics”, politics, “top 10” list spam, SEO gaming…etc that searches on Google, bing, and ddg are just frustrating.
Ah this is fantastic! I’ve only been using Kagi for a few months, and have been concerned about running into the search limit, but this means I can go and set it as the default everywhere now.
Awesome! The AI summarizer is very useful, and it gives quality search results from my experience with the free trial. $10 a month still seems a little high for a search engine, though I’m definitely eyeing it more now…
Hopefully we see more competition in the future with paid search engines, this seems to be new territory where everyone is still pretty unsure of the right pricing. I think $5 a month is going to be the sweet spot for me.
Same here. I did the trial 300 search thing and was very happy with that. Settling on the fiver a month plan as I can’t justify a tenner. Plus I realised that I don’t do much more than about 300 searches.
It’s so refreshing to not have ‘sponsored’ posts or adverts in front of your results.
Just heard of this service but I am signing up first thing tomorrow.
Hadn’t heard of this but stoked to try it out!
Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Also it’s automatically not private when it requires a login. They know exactly what user is searching what, and basically breaks search in incognito mode. Also people love more accounts to manage.
“If it’s free then you’re the product” isn’t even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance and you’ll be logging your own data. You’ll have complete control, it’s significantly cheaper, and it’s far more private without having to even login.
“If it’s free then you’re the product” isn’t even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
This is exactly what “you’re the product” means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they’re selling.
My comment says search engines. I specifically said that because I was not including Google. I know you specifically mentioned Google because other privacy search engines prove what you say as false. By that logic literally everything with consumers is a product, that’s such a vague statement.
You are also DuckDuckGo’s, StartPage’s and Qwant’s products. They sell your space on screen for ads. Now, they haven’t enshittificatied to nearly the same degree as Google and full enshittification happening is of course not a given but making the user a product is basically step #1 to enshittification.
With Kagi, the product is the search engine service. You pay money and in return you get search results, lenses, bangs and all those neat little features. You are not being sold to 3rd parties. (At least not right now but I honestly don’t see that happening any time soon.)
I’ll just use AdBlock and get best of both worlds. You also have no idea what kagi is doing with your data, it’s inherently eventually unprivate since it relies on a login. There is nothing wrong with ads, and they keep the service free and able to use it anonymously. The search results on free search engines are also the product here, since they only get paid from using them for results. All products require a userbase so that doesn’t even make sense.
You also have no idea what kagi is doing with your data
We in fact do have an idea what they do and don’t do:
- Searches are anonymous and private to you. Kagi does not log and associate searches with an account.
- We do not log or store your IP address. Your IP address is used only temporarily when enriching location/maps searches, and is not shared with any other party.
- We only store cookies needed for site functionality.
- We do not use any web browser analytics or other frontend telemetry.
- We do not display any ads, or have any first-party or third-party tracking in service of ads.
- We do not share customer data with third parties, except as needed to perform explicitly accessed services. In those cases, we will share the minimum amount of data needed to provide the service, and will do so in an anonymous way.
- We collect only the data needed to provide and protect the service.
- We proxy all images to prevent tracking from third parties.
- We use HTTPS encryption everywhere. All passwords are hashed and salted.
These terms are legally binding. If they did log searches despite these terms, that could end their business.
it’s inherently eventually unprivate since it relies on a login.
Not anonymous != unprivate.
Even if it was, I don’t think it’s different for all of the other search engines. For example: I do not believe for one second that Google can’t identify you without being logged into your account; even with all the blocklisting your typical ad-blocker does.
Go try and fool https://abrahamjuliot.github.io/creepjs/ if you want to go try how little even things like incognito mode help against identification on the web and this is all just relatively simple client-side analysis without behaviour tracking.There is nothing wrong with ads
I disagree that there is nothing wrong with modern propaganda but that’s a topic for another discussion.
The search results on free search engines are also the product here, since they only get paid from using them for results.
No. That’s the thing, they’re not. Search results only serve to attract users. They only need to be good enough to be acceptable to users; everything beyond that is a waste of time and money from a business perspective.
They receive exactly $0 from you as a user. There is no sale contract between you. Therefore, you are not their customer, you are the product they sell to their actual customers.
No ads disguised as search results. Actually, no ads at all. Great search results. Lenses.
Also, there is a solution for incognito mode. And ad supported, in practice means tracked by advertisers, and hence you are the product.
DDG proves literally all of that false. Also just use AdBlock with it. Elaborate on it working in private browsing without needing to login.
DDG is just a wrapper around Bing and substantially worse than Google, smaller index and less up to date. Not needing a login doesn’t really guarantee you anything either, as they still can identify you by IP or device finger print if they want to. You basically have to trust their marketing that they don’t do that.
What makes Kagi interesting is that it’s actually right up there with Google in terms of results, while surpassing it in terms of features. Would I pay $10/month for Kagi? Nope. It’s good, but not magic. It’s still just regular Internet search and you’ll find most of what it finds with other search engines as well, especially when you hop between multiple. But if you want a better search engine and have the money, Kagi does feel like an upgrade, which the other alternatives just don’t.
DDG has ads in the search result. Laginis honestly a great service. You can easily filter results and it removes BS SEO spam…
what search engines are actually good these days?
because that’s the problem, they aren’t
search results have gone down a sharp hill lately
I don’t think Kagi is the answer, but there is a problem - a big one
Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That’s very expensive to do. There’s two options as to how to pay for it:
- Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
- Have someone else pay for it for you. For example, advertising like what Google and Bing do
The latter is what people mean when they say “you’re the product”. The advertisers are the customers.
self-host a searx instance
Two totally different things.
Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.
Kagi doesn’t index, it’s Google results as a proxy. That’s literally what Searx does, and it’s free. The issues you said with needing to pay for search is solved with Searx even if you claim it doesn’t, it does. Also other search engines like DDG does a crawler + bing results is funded by ads, they’re profitable. The mental gymnastics to pay for a shitty service makes no sense to me, but you do you if you want to support this terrible practice. Not to mention the numerous other issues I listed that you ignored.
Searx could use Kagi though.
Lol that makes no sense, and it probably violates Kagi’s ToS. You’re running a self hosted proxy through a service that’s just a proxy for Google results. Just set Searx to search Google for the exact same thing.
“If you aren’t paying for something, you are the product” sounds nice, but isn’t true. Advertisment can exist and you can still not the product.
Instead it somehow makes more sense to pay for a privacy invasive search engine that requires a login, requires cookies, and doesn’t work in private search.
This says they index
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.html
Typically every search query on Kagi will call a number of different sources at the same time, all with the purpose of bringing the best possible search results to the user.
But most importantly, we are known for our unique results, coming from our web index (internal name - Teclis) and news index (internal name - TinyGem). Kagi’s indexes provide unique results that help you discover non-commercial websites and “small web” discussions surrounding a particular topic.
They just proxy searches and then sort them lol. Definitely caching thrown in there too, as if that even changes anything. You’re paying $10/mo for that when DDG does the same thing for free.
It says right there they have their own index, that they are pulling from Google et Al and also their own. Whether it’s worth $10, I dunno. But it sounds like more than just an aggregator
@abaci @mojo 100% worth it for me.
I switched from Google to #DDG to #Kagi. Even if the results were exactly the same, Kagi is FAST. The whole experience is very snappy.
Beyond that:
- All your DDG bangs work, and you can add custom bangs
- They have some neat AI summarization features.
- You can manually boost/penalize/block domains
- Lenses focus your search on particular kinds of sites
Comments like these really make this feel like this is astroturfing. It makes no sense to shill for a product this hard, let alone a really privacy invasive one that is worse the free alternatives.
Oh sick!! I was already on the $10/month plan. This is great news!!!
Same. Looks like you and I both will be getting unlimited searches now. :D
Samesies :P This is awesome. Love being a user and not the product. EDIT:
With the redirector extension you can import the following to help with muscle memory.
{ "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3", "createdAt": "2023-09-22T00:00:00.631Z", "redirects": [ { "description": "Google->Kagi", "exampleUrl": "https://www.google.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks&sca_esv=011101111&source=dv&ei=CN", "exampleResult": "https://kagi.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks", "error": null, "includePattern": ""^(?:https?):\\/\\/(?:www\\.)?google\\.com(\\/?$|(\\/search\\?q=.*?(?=[&])))"", "excludePattern": "", "patternDesc": "Redirect Kagi", "redirectUrl": "https://kagi.com$1", "patternType": "R", "processMatches": "noProcessing", "disabled": false, "grouped": false, "appliesTo": [ "main_frame" ] }, ] }Getting errors when trying to import :/
Lemmy’s attempt to make unsafe HTML “safe” in markdown, is screwing up the formatting in the code block. Download the actual properly formatted json here. Save to your PC as whatever.json and then import that file. It should work.
