Pete's Log: First Impressions of Kagi

Entry #2420, (World Wide Web)
(posted when I was 45 years old.)

Kagi has come up on my radar a few times lately. It's a paid, ad-free search engine. The premise is that because their revenue comes from the end-user instead of the advertiser, the experience is optimized for the end-user.

This is speaking my language. I've found Google to be terrible lately and DuckDuckGo not much better.

So I created an account and did their trial: 100 free searches. This evening I ran out of free searches and decided to sign up for their starter plan: 300 searches a month for $5 per month. I suspect I will hit that as well, in which case I can bump up to unlimited searches for $10 a month.

For the most part, Kagi seems just fine. I haven't had a case yet where Kagi was objectively worse than Google or DuckDuckGo. Mostly it's felt equivalent. I haven't played with their advanced features much yet, but there are a few things I've liked so far:

  • No ads! It was actually disorienting at first, because I hadn't realized how trained my brain has become to scan past the first few results to look for real results.
  • Site details: each domain has a little popup you can click on for some site details:
    Kagi Domain Preview for esgeroth.org, includes the page title; description; favicon; a Website ranking adjustment with the options to block, lower, raise and pin; info on Ads/Trackers: None detected; Website Connection: This site uses https; Website Speed: Fast
    This allows you to change the ranking for that domain, and also preview if it looks like a domain you feel like visiting.
  • Lenses: lenses allow you to narrow down what results are included. You can define your own (which I haven't yet), but also use a few predefined ones. I really like the recipe lens. Using it, the search results seem to include more recipes from reasonable sites and less from SEO-spam-hell.
  • Blast from the Past: on a lot of searches, Kagi will highlight a few results from longer ago. It's a nice touch, even though "longer ago" often turns out to be as recent as 2018.
  • It feels like it's more honest about its limitations when it can't find any good results.

I do have a couple minor things I don't like:

  • Their home page at times feel cluttered, especially on mobile
  • The results page feels at times to be lacking consistency in how it's displayed. I think this is because they try to surface a variety of things (like the Blast from the Past) and my brain is still fighting its training to try to skip anything that might be an ad. I suspect this will become less of an issue as I use it more.
  • This one is not their fault: I can't set it as a default search engine in Safari on my phone. Discovering this left me feeling rather disappointed in Apple. Workarounds include using other browsers or maybe a plugin, but it's a bummer. Let me pick other search engines, Apple!

It's felt silly lately to be running searches on three search engines at a time. Makes me think back to the mid-90s when I made a search engine launch page. It's strange to think that it was Google that made that page obsolete and now they've gone and messed that up.

I know paying for a search engine is not for everyone but lately I just really don't like ads and not having ads feels like enough of a reason to give Kagi a chance. I'm not completely sold on them yet, but my first 100 searches were good enough that I'm going to try 300 more and see where we go from there.