Two years with Kagi (search engine)

Recently, I realized that I am paying for my search engine of choice, kagi for two years now. ¹ Here is a short take about my experience.

Why I moved to Kagi

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I was fed up with Google ads and product links cluttering my search results. When you pay for a service, you are the customer and not the product. Kagi has a strong focus on privacy, which is important to me.

What keeps me a Kagi customer

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All the reasons I mentioned above still apply. Kagi continues to improve and provides a transparent changelog. The search results are good quality and the search engine is customizable, both in search and UI. I really like the auto quick answer feature that can be triggered by appending ? to a search query and shows the answer directly in your search. I recently upgraded to the ultimate subscription and I’m also using Kagi Translate.

A word on AI Assistant

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I upgraded to the ultimate subscription not long ago and I’m surprised I didn’t do it sooner. The AI assistant is really good and fits perfectly into my browser workflow.

There is a great variety of up to date models to choose from. The bang integration (!ai, !chat, !code) is excellent (docs). It’s very snappy compared to Claude Pro and ChatGPT Plus, which often take some time to load or delete a chat. Actually, the main benefit for me is not so much the model selection but the much better ergonomics of the webpage.

One thing to note is that there is no API usage of the models. Also, there is no Claude Code and OpenAI Codex support, which require direct subscriptions.

Things I did not try out (yet)

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I think these are the only features I haven’t tried out and feel that I have no usage for it. But maybe I am wrong 🤣

• Lenses
• Personalized results

What I don’t like

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To be honest, there is nothing I can argue against Kagi. The search results always fit my needs and I have a good feeling that I am the customer and not the product.

Worth it?

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Most people I talk to about this are surprised that a paid search engine even exists and shake their heads wondering why I would pay for something that’s available for free. But this is the same mistake people make over and over. Free services often have a higher price than you think. These days, your search history can reveal a lot about you as a person, and I don’t feel comfortable with all that data sitting at Google. Since I only use Kagi now, I can’t really compare the quality of search results anymore. What I can say is that I never felt the need to go back to Google because I couldn’t find what I was looking for with Kagi’s results, which definitely happened with other search engines.