There’s a new web search in town. No, it’s not a re-skin of Bing results. No, it’s not an AI powered tool chasing this particular moment of Large Language Model (LLM) hype. Kagi is an honest to goodness general purpose search engine with a simple proposal:
Pay us $10 USD a month and we’ll provide you with good search results.
A few of you just got very excited, and some others just closed this tab. Kagi is a very unusual product in 2024. The tool isn’t without its quirks, but it’s the sort of service you can easily write a few thousand words discussing. If you’re interested in technology and the web, it’s worth signing up and kicking their tires.
Kagi’s been building buzz for the last year, but I’d been dragging my heels on making the switch. It turns out the way to keep New Year’s tech resolutions is to replace your app defaults. Here’s my assorted thoughts after a January, February, and March without Google and Safari.
Paying For Search
It’s hard not to talk about the state of the web as a whole when discussing search engines. The internet’s having a bit of a moment. Longstanding websites like Twitter and Reddit are making antagonistic moves against their user bases. Google and Amazon are dealing with a floor of affiliate links and search engine optimized sludge. Looming on the horizon, LLM outputs threatens to swallow the web whole.
Out of all of this comes Kagi. On the face of it, they’re yet another subscription looking to monetize some small silver of your daily life. If you take a step back however, some interesting things happen when you pay for search.
Kagi describes themselves as “user-centric search”. You’re paying them directly for the service they’re rendering. This has two significant and immediate effects: Kagi doesn’t need to show you ads, and their search has to be good.
Not having ads always makes for an enjoyable browsing experience. As cable TV has proven time and time again, paid services and advertising aren’t completely incompatible which one another. For the time being however Kagi is happy to be one of the increasingly few internet oases that isn’t actively trying to sell you something every time you interact with it.
This has substantial benefits on the privacy side of things. Since you’re the customer and not the product, Kagi doesn’t need to integrate extensive surveillance and tracking technologies into their tool. They don’t log searches, associate searches with your accounts, and they even spell out, in plain English, the intent of the 5 cookies they use.
The privacy angle is nice, but Duck Duck Go has also been around for a bit. They offer an anonymized ad-supported privacy-focused search. Building a successful web service at scale purely off of ad revenue has become increasingly tricky however, so Duck Duck Go’s search results are largely a proxy for Microsoft’s middling Bing search. (Sorry Bing.)
The exciting thing about Kagi is that you’re paying them for search. If it’s not good, no one’s going to subscribe for a second month. The company actively pitches the aligned incentives that come from being an ad-free, paid search tool. They get their money from building a good search engine. They don’t benefit from driving traffic to sponsored links, affiliate vendors, or vertically integrated products. Kagi’s search is pretty good as a result.
Kagi Search
It’s tricky to objectively judge something like the quality of search results. (Although there are some good attempts to do so.) When search results are good, you hardly notice them. When they’re off, it’s immediate and apparent. Not to harp on Bing again, but everyone’s had that experience of searching on a new work computer or public terminal and struggling to find what they’re looking for before realizing they’re not using Google.
Web search quality is vibes based. And the vibes are off. People have been whinging for a while now about whether or not Google Search results are getting worse. While drafting this blog post, Google themselves admitted they need to make some significant changes to their search results to filter out AI generated spam and SEO reputation laundering.
All of this is to say that I’ve been satisfied with the search results Kagi provides. They “pass the vibe check” so to speak. While testing Kagi I rarely (if ever) experienced that mental whiplash of viewing “off” search results only to realize I’m “that other search engine”. Kagi’s search is good. It’s not a party trick. It’s not situational. It’s good search. You should give it a try.
When searching for a question online, Kagi does a good job of surfacing results from human-centric discussion sites like Reddit or Stack Overflow. When searching for cooking recipes, I notice a slightly more diverse set of food blogs then with Google Search. Comparison shopping or searching for information about a mainstream product does seem to fall down some of the same SEO pitfalls that Google has. This feels more like an artifact of the current state of the web then a particular search engine deficiency however.
The actual browsing experience with Kagi is pleasant. It sticks with the established Google-style search results page. It delivers links with blurbs, sub-links, and embedded rich content. If you search for something with significant video or image results, Kagi has a familiar strip of thumbnails inviting you to pivot over to one of those dedicated search views. It’s a very familiar search experience you can transition into easily. Kagi’s focus is on the search engine itself, and they’re not trying to be cute with unusual user interface innovations.
That’s not to say Kagi doesn’t have some unique touches of its own however. Once you’ve gotten familiar with the initial search experience, there’s a lot of additional functionality you can start taking advantage of within Kagi.
On the search side, Kagi lets you adjust the ranking of pages within your personal search results. If your recipe searches are anything like mine, that might involve bumping up SeriousEats.com links. If you’ve been burned by one too many AllRecipes.com recipes, you can even go as far as hiding all pages in that domain from your search results.
If you’re a web search power user, Kagi’s Lens functionality may be of particular note to you. If you find yourself frequently searching for programming support for example, you can narrow down Kagi’s view of the web to just the handful of official documentation sites and support forums for the language you’re working with. It’s a bit of a brute force approach to cutting out blog spam, but you were probably scrolling down to the StackOverflow.com or Dev.to links anyways, right? This tool’s a bit more situational, but it’s nice seeing some thought put into how to push the search experience forward.
There’s just something comforting about using opinionated software that doesn’t feel like it has gone through eight code reviews and six departmental presentations. Kagi’s clearly built by a team who cares about search. When searching for an image, Kagi provides you with links to go to the page the image is on and a direct link to the image itself. No more having to right click and fiddling around for the “Open Image In New Tab” option! Fancy that. These nice touches range from quick shortcuts all the way to letting users upload a custom CSS user theme for the site.
If you’re hesitant to make the full time switch to Kagi, the “Bang” functionality they borrowed from Duck Duck Go is of particular note. If you prefix a search with !g, Kagi will instead forward that search query over to Google. !r sends you to Reddit’s internal search instead. !yt is a direct link to YouTube search, etc. Duck Duck Go has cataloged thousands of these integrations.
I didn’t find myself needing a Google escape hatch that often. When I did, it was mostly when searching for local businesses. Kagi has integration with Apple Maps and Yelp for finding nearby restaurants, but Google Maps remain notably strong in that one area. I use the !g shortcut maybe once a week on the unlimited plan, but they’re instrumental when working with Kagi’s lower priced tiers. Speaking of which;
Don’t Bother With Kagi’s $5/Month Search Tier
Kagi’s updated their pricing a few times throughout the life of the product, so go ch
