It's so crazy to me to hear these super positive opinions. I gave kagi a shot for several months but the results were quite a bit worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Maybe it's because I live in Germany and kagi doesn't do well with German content but I never understood the hype of kagi.
Comparing Kagi to Google on an individual search basis may not be the best way to assess the service. There are a number of features that make it preferable to Google and DuckDuckGo for many of us.
- Ranking results from specific websites has been well referenced in comments here. I love always knowing if something is on archive.org and wikipedia by having those results come to the top. I also rank certain sources of medical information up and down based on reputability, basically overriding their SEO nonsense.
- There are subtle indications for sites that have a high number of ads and trackers, allowing me to opt not to even click on those results.
- AI summaries and answers are not on by default, and simply adding a question mark to the end of my search allows me to get an AI generated answer to my inquiry. I've found these to be very good, but I don't always want them so the control is great.
- Marketing and ecommerce sites seem to be aggressively minimized, which makes the internet feel less like walking through a mall. I only really go to Google if I am shopping for something and want those kinds of results, but this is rare.
All of this makes for a much better experience of the internet overall for me. The reduced cognitive noise is well worth the $10 in my case.
I can't speak to how it preformed in non-English content, so you may be well served by using Google for German content in that case.
It is worse than Google at some queries, but for me that's a tiny fraction of my total searches. I usually only use Google if I need local results / Google Maps.
What makes Kagi great is that they let you customize results. I've pinned wikipedia, for instance. Google first throws AI slop in your face (with no way of disabling it), followed promptly by (presumably also AI-generated) blog spam, Pinterest links, and other useless garbage that I can't filter.
fwiw, I search in German every once in a while and the results are a lot better than Google (in the US, anyways), since I don't need a VPN to get "good" results and have a quick toggle button for my location built into Kagi.
Also, as a company, they seem great: They are neutral, run as a PBC, are very open and transparent about what they offer and why it costs money ("no BS", if you will), are receptive to feedback and do consumer-friendly stuff like this change.
I haven't seen Pinterest in my search results for years and honestly that alone is worth the price of admission.
If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
> If I get a bad result from an ai slop blog, I can permanently ban it. I think that Kagi aggregates this user feedback to globally downrank some sites, but I might be wrong.
I agree this is a critical feature, but uBlacklist does this with Google for free. Without uBlacklist I'd gladly pay $10/month just to have "Google search without Pinterest results," but fortunately that's not required.
This is the best feature of kagi. I still use google as a backup (there are a handful of large websites that only allow crawling from the big guys - reddit in particular), but the fact that I can ban experts-exchange, pinterest, and other horseshit is alone worth the price of admission.
