this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2023
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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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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Oh sick!! I was already on the $10/month plan. This is great news!!!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Same. Looks like you and I both will be getting unlimited searches now. :D

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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"
            ]
        },
    ]
}
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[–] snowe 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Same too! I was literally considering the update to the family plan so I could share it. This is welcome news.

Edit: I’m actually going to update to the duo plan. Super affordable now!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

We switched to Duo, too. Making that plan unlimited was the las barrier to my spouse jumping aboard the Kagi train. We're in for the yearly Duo sub as of this evening!

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Probably a good pricing decision. To avoid hitting the 300/month usage I kept DDG as default and only used Kagi for more complex searches. If I upgrade to this I could then keep Kagi as default.

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[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I probably come in at ~30-50 searches/day so I never really considered it. But unlimited sounds interesting 🤔

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

This is awesome! I always wanted to try out Kagi but was not huge fan of the original pricing model. I think I might have to give Kagi a try now!

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Does anyone have experience with non-english searches? Are the results of similar quality?

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

@sculd asked the same question further down and got a couple of good responses.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

What's wrong with simply switching as soon as enshittification starts? You're not making any permanent commitments to it.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

There is no law in the requiring data logging in the US, nor is it required to comply with FBI security data requests. This has been fought for and won in court and beat out gag orders over the subject. It is also deemed a violation of the first amendment.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

It does, I search in languages other than English quite often and the results are still high quality IMO.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

It sea4ches in different languages, but there is no way to force language of the results. Instead, ot tries to be "smart" and uses languages of the region. So it has the same problem Google and Bing does: giving you results in random languages outside of language region (or in multi-lingual regions), even when request is explicitly in language A.

There is a feature request to implement this setting, but not much hope to have this soon.

On this note, if someone knows of a search engine that allows specifying language of results, please let me know :)

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (6 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (4 children)

"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.

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[–] snaggen 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (7 children)

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:

  1. Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
  2. 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.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better

They aren't, that is why.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

They probably haven't updated the page. This blog post says:

With new search sources proving more cost-efficient, the improved efficiency of our infrastructure, and the broader market embracing Kagi, we can again offer an unlimited experience to a broader group of users.

So it sounds like they have made lots of efficiencies to make it cheaper per search. I'm sure more subscribers helps as well.

But I'm really curious about the "new search sources" part. Where do they source their searches from?

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Just heard of this service but I am signing up first thing tomorrow.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm intrigued, but I don't want to login to a search engine :/

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Yesss! Immediately upgraded to duo unlimited for me and my partner.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Kagi has better search results than any other engine I've used. That is why people pay for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No it doesn't. SearXNG aggregates all engines anyways; and that gets far more helpful results.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago

Hadn’t heard of this but stoked to try it out!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

That is actually great thing for now was using you.com might finally move

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Hmm I hope this one will live on. I remember Neeva which never let their users know that they could sign up and then shut down because they didn't have enough income..

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