Kagi won. Google lost.

Until a few weeks ago, I had not heard about Kagi. I think there is a chance that you haven’t heard about Kagi either.

Kagi.com ← click this if you want to see Kagi with your own eyes… and device.

Kagi, as illustrated by the link above, is a search engine. It’s a really, excellent search engine. The downside is that it costs money to use.

The cheapest unlimited usage tier is $10 a month. I just paid for my first month as my trial ended, and was happy to do so.

I took the trial simply because I was curious. Then after a few days was blow away by how good the results were. Also, since the closure of Leta, the reality that perhaps paying for things makes them last, has set in.

Why is it good, though?

Now, I am an adblock man. I feel no guilt in blocking ads wherever I see them. I also support creators where I can and pay my way around the Web where required. I do not, however, think it is reasonable to expect me to wade through crappy internet ads to read an article I’m interested in. If you won’t let me look at your site without turning Adblock off, I will simply never look at it.

For those interested, I use Wipr (2) and AdGuard on all my devices, between them the blocking is over 9000 (I don’t see any ads at all)

Despite not seeing the ads for years, I have been aware for a while now that they are still influencing my life. While I block the sponsored stuff on Google, the results are still weighted with ad revenue in mind and since they have introduced the AI summary slop at the top of the page, I have been dissatisfied with the service.

I tried DuckDuckGo and several others, but Google was still marginally better because while it returned weighted results, they are at leats usually relevant. DDG and others have more than once appeared to misunderstand my search entirely and had me wade through tangentially relevant stuff in ways which annoyed more than edified.

When I heard about Kagi and that there was a trial, I was curious enough to give it a go. And, yeah…

• No weighing based on advertising, none.
• No sponsored crap.
• No AI summary, though I can option to show one should I want to.
• No visual noise to block.
• No pre-highlighting of results or pages (you know, that strange thing no one ever asked Google to do for us.)
• I can deprioritise or even block sites entirely from results.
• I can change the ordering methodology for results. (It allows me to filter results by posting date, for example.)
• I can report websites I think are fishy, right from the results page.
• The image search is just a page of images, no site links.
• It can (attempt) to filter out AI images on that image page too.
• The logo is a cute dog!

And that’s only the core search. Kagi also has an AI assistant which allows you to select a model (though, so far, I have found it serviceable, but not amazing for academic work.) It has an AI summariser which has actually been pretty useful (for that academic stuff I was just talking about) and a news font-end that has a pretty sensible set of sources.

If you are willing to at least consider paying for a search service, I think you should give it ago. For me, with the AI assistant and summariser on top of the searching, it has crossed the line into ‘fine, I’ll pay!’

Give it a try, you may like it. Or, don’t, I guess.