I realize that this post sounds like I’m shilling for Kagi, so I’ll say up front that I have no affiliation with them whatsoever. I’m just a satisfied customer. I’ll also fully admit that I don’t know much about the controversies or privacy issues other people are referencing. So look at others’ replies for that. I’ll be doing my research about it too.

From a purely search perspective, I don’t really use their customizations. I don’t need to. It far and away beats any competition in my experience. I’ve used it for over a year now, and will probably never switch off of it. Every month or two, when I have to use a different browser or machine that has DuckDuckGo, Startpage, or Brave, I get frustrated within a few minutes of searching. Maybe some self-hosted stuff can compete, but I haven’t tried any of them for any length of time. Of the handful of people I’ve recommended it to IRL, they all switched over permanently.

But general praise isn’t worth anything without an explanation, so here is a long-winded one.

1. Lenses are awesome! Of the ones I use the most:

   • Forums is a much better version of appending “reddit” to a search.
   • PDFs comes in handy for me specifically. I read a lot of papers, and it is very good at skipping past annoying sign in, click through four buttons, and go through a captcha to get to the pdf.
   • Academic is a good supplement to Google Scholar. I still use scholar as my main search for academic sources since I don’t want to miss any papers that other people will find. But Kagi often finds some relevant papers that don’t appear high up Google Scholar.

2. The amount of AI slop, SEO-optimized articles on other search engines is just abhorrent. I’m not sure how they do it, but Kagi does an amazing job at cutting them out. I no longer fear searching for “best vacuums for hard floors” or whatever. The results that come up are actual good review sites (Consumer Reports, Rtings.com, specific websites dedicated to vacuum reviews) and sometimes useful Reddit posts. On other search engines (at least back when I switched to Kagi), I only got AI generated listicles of what are the first 10 results on Amazon with “reviews” that are just rewordings of the amazon descriptions.

3. I know AI in search is controversial, but I think the “Quick Answer” feature is done very tastefully. I do think there are searches where AI summaries can be helpful, efficient, and unlikely to be inaccurate. The button doesn’t feel intrusive, and I’ll end up clicking it about 1/10 searches.

4. I like the little shield on the right side that gives you an insight into how many ads/trackers a site has. It’s another thing that can help you make better choices on which websites to go to. Not a huge thing, but I like it.

5. I’ll admit this one is less precise, but I feel like search results are much closer to what I’m actually looking for. When I’m searching for something very specific, the results are exactly what I want, not tangential.

Summary: For my personal day-to-day searches, Kagi is a no-brainer. It make searching easy and frictionless again. It’s what I’d expect a good search engine to be like in 2026. And I think it’s worth paying for a service when it provides value, especially when you aren’t the product.

I have it, I use it, I like it. I love not seeing ads, I love getting more independent results like blogs, I love getting tailored websites based on my own design (meaning i personally flagged things for more or less weight in the Algo).

I’m aware they’re not as privacy focused as they claim to me. I’m aware the founder is a bit weird and that they have some AI components. Right now id rather pay them $100 bucks a year than give that same amount to Google via ads, and most importantly protecting my information sphere.

If there was a better paid option I’d consider switching. I’m not convinced SearX or whatever it is is worth the effort, so Kagi I remain.

I have subscribed for two separate months before, when doing a project that involved a lot of research.

I always cancelled after the project was done, because of their stance on privacy. They clearly pretend to be privacy focused, but you need to provide an email and their privacy policy didnt even meet the legal bare minimum in the EU up until a month or so ago, which is just embarasing. Yes, they have that privacy pass thing, but then it blocks like half the features that make kagi good so I didnt use it much.

I pay for it, like $100 or so a year. I don’t use any of the AI features, just the search. The search results are great, better than Google. I’m happy with it.

Yup, and it has been great. In terms of time saved and general result quality for what I do, it’s worth it to me.

Why not just use this and it is free https://github.com/searxng/searxng

I am. Loving it.

Qwant is better and it’s free, the only alternative search engine that gives me decent results without loosing too much to google

I currently have the trial and I use it when other search engines like DDG fail me. It has helped me find documented solutions to tech problems at work that came up empty from other sources. I feel like the search results are more similar in quality to what google used to be in the early days of the internet, maybe even at the height of their dont be evil days. Which is really good praise

I am on the fence about subscribing, because although they claim privacy the fact that my searches are tied to my account in some form is an issue, even if there doesnt appear to be search history. Also the value of search really has been pushed so far down by other options that the cost is extremely hard to justify for me

“Avoid companies selling you infotmation…”

Ironically Kagi sells you information, just that the info is free of ads.

heard many replies mention the CEO’s questionable behavior. I have not heard of any. Anyone have links? Also let’s not just disregard shitty / questionable behavior and really lean into it - because it won’t go away. We’d just pump cash into someone who then learns being questionable or shitty is ok.

It’s not as good as Google from 20 years ago, but much better than Google today.

I didn’t choose it for the privacy, I chose it because I wanted to actually get results for my searches.

Google gets me answers about 20% of the time,
Kagi about 50%,
and (generic - not Kagi) AI about 80% of the time.

The problem with AI as search is that the other 20% is when it will confidently give me wrong answers and waste hours of my time, so I guess Kagi is still useful to me.

I begrudgingly think it is worth it, though mainly for the purposes of better search results. You can up/down rank, and even block websites. The amount of time you save not having to trudge through enshittified results is amazing, and sadly (imo) justifies the $10/month for no Pinterest, medium, quora.

The value proposition from a privacy and moral perspective is more questionable however. Though it does offer more privacy conscious options than other search engines (not saying much), the defaults are definitely not very privacy respecting.

I know that LLMs are generally antithetical to privacy, but Kagi’s LLM offerings are usually vetted for things such as zero data retention. IIRC their LLM queries actually cost more than their search queries, so it’s somewhat of a loss leader.

Kagi as a company also just seems… immature? Most of their customer/community engagement is via a Discord server, and with an ever increasing amount of half-baked features no one asked for (browser, translate, and even email), combined with their CEO’s questionable behaviour, does not inspire much confidence.

On the other hand, their search is still the best, and they have other features such as SlopStop (like sponsor block but for flagging AI slop results), and dedicated small web index are genuinely amazing.

I love it, I use it quite a bit, and it get shit done. The web is boring again, instead of all the flashy shopping banners, I just search, done, and leave.

Their LLM is opt-in and on demand. Your search never triggers LLM by default, and you will need to add a question mark after it. This feature can of course, be turned off.

The privacy aspect is honestly a bit lacking besides “trust me bro”, they have this great privacy pass extension, but it disables all setting, because it can be used to personally identify you if you have complex page rank preference. I am okay to not have extensive settings but “open in new tab” and safe search settings would be nice to have :( plus, it also doesn’t work on firefox for android.

I subscribed briefly, then requested a refund. The reason was both for the highly customisable and curated search, but also for Assistant - because I trust Kagi a little more than Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, or Perplexity with my “best pancake batter according to Reddit” queries - even if that’s fundamentally compromising my privacy. Kagi tended to deliver better information in general, so maybe I’d want to use LMs less frequently - I thought.

However, that slight hint of trust was shattered very quickly when they did what every company with a profit does best - sold me a lie:

https://kagifeedback.org/d/10116-kagi-assistant-standalone-subscription

Which means what I’d subscribed to will have eventually gotten worse, likely for the same price, and Kagi had no intention of letting me know before I subscribed, and their intention seemed to be to just make active subscriptions worse, as they were opposed to grandfathering in the thread.

So I decided I’ll pass, I have enough “products” I don’t trust. Even if it’s all in the “we’re ‘contemplating’ stage”, it’s clear what their approach is and how far they’re willing to go with, pardon me, fucking users over.

P.S. I understand the sustainability problem. But I’d have expected them to have that part figured out before actively offering it in a subscription. The way they are going about it is off-putting. So, no thanks.