Why I Pay for Search

I think Google as a company is doing great, and I do support many of the things they do. But search isn't one of them. Here are a couple of reasons why I prefer using Kagi, a paid search engine. So much so that I have invested in the company in their second round.

Kagi sources their results from all major search engines (Google, Bing, Yandex, ...) as well as niche providers and tools (Wolfram Alpha, Yelp, Open Meteo, ...).

This article is split into tangible benefits, which save me time every day and make Kagi a measurably better search engine for me, and intangible benefits that I usually forget about but make me feel a bit nice.

Tangible Benefits

Just results.

No ads. No quick questions. No AI answers. No sponsored results.

Just results that matter.

Customization

I can go in and control how the results are generated. Useful and trusted sources can be upranked or pinned to the top, so they will always show up when your query gets a hit on them.

Aweful and useless sites like the Apple discussions forum can be downranked or, as they should, completely blocked from your results. Some stats: The most-blocked websites are pinterest, foxnews and tiktok. The most-pinned websites are wikipedia, the mozilla developer website and reddit.

Integrated features

Summarize, open in webArchive or ask an LLM right from search.

AI, when I want it

Add a question mark or press the quick answer button, and you will get an AI summary with citations. No question mark means no automatic AI summary.

Perplexity included!

Kagi assistant is a notes-inspired chat interface. By default, the AI model can search the internet, giving you basically the complete perplexity experience in Kagi! You can also upload files and define custom agents with different models and system prompts.

Context Control

Google does a great job at personalization. But what if I don't want personalization and instead want to know what other people's results would be? Kagi lets me control the context, e.g., letting me search like a user from a different country!

Great, e.g., for vacation planning. Just set the country to your destination country, and now you can search like normal instead of having to append the country to every query.

Tools for Powerusers

Build advanced queries right in the search UI! This is very much identical to the query builder that Google offers. But on Kagi it's right on the start page and not buried three clicks away. Power-searchers rejoice!

Spiritual Benefits

Bringing back small web.

There might be a longer post about this at some point, but basically, the internet has changed. I am old enough - maybe barely, but still - to remember the old internet of small and unpolished blogs and forums. It was an innocent place where you could open up a much cleaner-looking Google, search for 'Bitcoin faucet,' and get some free Bitcoin. No one used their real name, and you could telnet into the whitehouse server and use it to send emails. Today's internet in comparison feels hostile. Tracking, blogspam, captchas, ads, and aggressive and intransparent affiliate marketing.

Kagi is trying to reconnect users and bring back the small web with their small web index. Turn on their small web lens (a feature I neglected to mention, but it's essentially a couple predefined filters on your results), and you will find results I promise you usually won't find.

These pages will be kind of shitty by many of today's measurements and often badly optimized. Like sometimes they even load a lot slower. But they feel human. It's not something I use regularly (hence a spiritual benefit), but it's nice. I like humans doing their unique thing.

Privacy

They don't log your queries or profile you. Right from the search results, before opening a page, they show you a warning symbol if a page contains many trackers.

Such pages are also downranked automatically.

Kagi is paid, so you do need to authenticate for every query. But you can still use it without tying a query (which is not logged anyway) to your account. The technology behind that is based on RFC-standardized privacy passes. Here is their blog post. Essentially it lets you generate anonymous tokens, each of which can be used for one search query. There is a browser extension that handles this process automatically.

Public Benefit Corporation

Kagi is a public benefit corporation since 2024. Their statement says:

Kagi is committed to creating a more human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole, with a transparent business model that aligns the incentives of everyone involved.

Maybe I should hate that as an investor. But I'm also a stupid enough investor to really like putting society first.

Transparency

Stats! Check out how many (paying) users they have or how many queries are performed each day.

AI filters

I do like that they are very mindful and proactive when it comes to AI. They have a feature that lets you filter AI-generated images.

As an AI researcher, I am hardly an AI hater, quite the opposite. But I do think we need to find ways to navigate the broad changes introduced by AI, and - while I have some technical concerns - at least they are trying something!

No Free Lunch

It's clear that Kagi invests a lot into making search better, adding useful features for the end user, and keeping the experience clean. This relentless focus is not free. It's not something that fits, e.g., Google's business model, where someone else pays for you to see ads. Kagi's focus on your experience as the searcher has a price. And that price is exactly $10 per month (for unlimited searches). I don't expect this to be the best deal for everyone, so Kagi will not replace Google in my opinion (and Google does far more than search anyway). But for me, a researcher with thousands of searches per month, it is well worth it to get the best experience available.