Experience with Kagi

Never thought I would pay for search

Besides say, the obvious point in my life of trying to minimise my exposure to Google, search is one of those things that’s rather hard to avoid. Sure, for years I’ve had DuckDuckGo (DDG) as my default, but I was just as accustomed to doing the !g bang to just send my search to Google. It always felt like I couldn’t quite have full confidence in the results for DDG. Maybe it was because I knew behind the scenes they were using Bing’s indexes. So, even if I searched something with DDG, if I did not find what I felt I was looking for, I would immediately revert to Google Search.

But even if you just go beyond say, self hosting and privacy related reasons, is it fair to say that Google Search just sucks now? Even just strip everything else away for a moment, to me it just felt like I could never quite find what I was looking for anymore. For starters, it seemed within the last few years, Google has disproportionately favoured Reddit as a source for possible answers. Which I mean, can be fair in some cases, you’re perhaps more likely to find a niche community on there for something you’re specifically looking for. But at that point…just do your search directly on Reddit? I’m trying to search the whole internet here, not just one place. A place which in the past two years I’ve been extremely aggressive in minimising from my life (RIP Apollo), partly in a mission to deprioritise algorithmic feeds from the content I consume. Anyway, tangent, I digress.

Besides that, there is also the obvious in the form of advertising, Google’s core business. It’s good to point out that the founders of Google, in effect predicted that once a search engine starts prioritising advertising, the quality of search results starts to degrade. Google search started out as an alternative to the advertising based search engines of the time, pretty sure you can even find old marketing material that touts the lack of advertising in Google search! So ultimately you end up with having ads being pushed to the top. Which at least, do tend to be noted as such (i.e “sponsored” or “suggested”). But it just pollutes what you could be trying to find.

Then there’s the AI summaries. I remember when Google initially tried to just offer, summaries. Without the slop. I don’t know if this was part of..AMP? But at least with some websites they would give you a brief summary and then you could still visit the website to learn more. But then enter the AI machine. I still recall, searching for disaster recovery documentation in work for JFrog Xray. And of course the first thing is an AI summary with the opening along the lines “Setting up disaster recovery for JFrog Xray is easy and straightforward!” the usual you know, overtly optimistic nature of these AI features. Then clicking the “show more” bit of the summary to the next paragraph opening with “To configure disaster recovery for JFrog Distribution…” an entirely different product from that company.

As an aside, if you happen to stumble upon this article in your search engine of choice, trying to figure out Xray DR. The advice I got ~six months ago from support was that basically, there is no DR, besides any say built in backups you may get with your PaaS DB of choice.

So what was I to do? I had been strongly considering self hosting SearXNG which was a self hosted option for search. With the hesitation of well, my self hosting tends to have the habit of self destructing which would not be good when said self destruction also includes my ability to search. Then I figured I would just suffer from the same problem I had with DDG where I basically search once with the alternative, then go back to Google. After a bit of soul searching, I learned via my wonderful self hosting circles about Kagi.

I’m quite happy to admit that when push came to shove, I was very hesitant to throw my card details at them. Like, who pays for search?! is what I also imagined people IRL would be telling me. And after a while, I realised I would simply reply with the same kind of person who pays for email. The very simple truth, the smallest kernel of truth, if you’re not paying for a product, you’re not the customer, you’re the product. So eventually, I made my account with Kagi, at the very least starting with the free trial. Just to see really before making any kind of commitment.

Very early on, I realised why everyone I was talking to, lauded Kagi. Searching and getting legitimate results for my queries, with just no slop felt euphoric. Like you know how you might end up tolerating a bad thing and don’t realise what kind of toll it’s taking on you? I rapidly adjusted my devices to have Kagi be the default for my search experience across everything I did. I also, quite happily, subscribed to the starter plan at $5 per month. I even had a real tangible example of tracking down the rather niche documentation to solve an issue in work, that some of my colleagues were also trying to find, first. Not that these things are a race of course, but just being able to find things quickly with far less need to sift through irrelevant stuff, was amazing. And my previous comments with regards Reddit being favoured too much? I can just set Kagi to downrank Reddit results in my search feed. It can still come into the results, but it won’t be dominating the top of the page. Or, I could go a step further and just block it entirely!

The only say, quirk I found of my experience, was that I felt like I could get away with the $5 starter plan, which has 300 searches per month. I was still in the midst of adjusting to the mindset of paying for search. But also it’s just another subscription in a world of subscriptions and my own personal world of mortgage saving. But that plan is also called the Starter plan and I felt I was nickel and diming myself in literally counting my searches that I was doing. I’d also consider myself a professional, so I upgraded to the $10 tier, otherwise known as the Professional plan and now I have unlimited searches. I’ve been using Kagi since September, and the following numbers are based on my monthly use as versus my billing period use so keep that in mind. But on average per month, I’m doing 408 searches.

There is also Kagi Assistant which lets you use various LLM models and craft your own Assistants, so for example one assistant for general tasks with more general purpose model. And another one for more programming based things and perhaps custom instructions. It all seems decent but my overall AI usage of things is likely lower than most, even then I get a GitHub Copilot Business license via work so it tends to be my defacto place for creating my own personal slop.

I’ve not used it as much but their Small Web feature is also a treat. It’s great to find small websites and blogs of people just talking or discussing things they’re passionate about. Once again alluding to previous points I made, I’m working towards trying to have as little algorithmic based feeds in my life for where I get the content I consume. There’s a risk of making my own little echo chamber. But on one hand, frankly, there’s enough insanity in the world on a near daily basis that I’d rather just be in my own bubble? And on the other hand, whenever I do get to having my own little collection of RSS feeds, I can use Small Web to just give me a roulette of something else to read, which is quite nice.

I’d really recommend giving Kagi a try. Even just like me with the free trial at first. Just do some search queries with Kagi in one tab and Google or your other search engine of choice in another. For me it’s been really worth the money and I’m looking forward to hopefully seeing their web browser, Orion, make it to Windows. I use all three major operating systems on a near daily basis and I prefer having just one browser. I should probably still kick the tyres on it now on MacOS. But yeah, I’ve been Google search-free for a few months now and I plan on changing to an annual plan soon. I just want to mess around with their Assistant a bit more before doing so as I may even go to the “Ultimate” plan to get more usage on that front.