In this series of posts, I am describing several essential services to which I migrated after years of enjoying “free” sweet convenience, opting for more user-centric privacy focused paid solutions. In the first post I talked about my switch from Google’s Gmail to Fastmail as my preferred email provider.
In this post, I will discuss how I replaced the internet search giant Google with Kagi Search. After all, who wants to scroll through pages of irrelevant advertisements just to find something relevant to their search prompts?
Let’s search for better search
My first stop in this journey was the privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo. It seemed like an obvious choice, but after months of trying, the search results were not really usable, and I always had to roll back to Google if I was trying to find something more specific. I don’t know if it was because of my location or if DuckDuckGo was simply not ready for prime time at that moment.
Next, I tried to switch to Ecosia. Their environmentalist focus was appealing to me, and even though I knew that they are basically a rebranded Bing search engine, I gave it a go. Results were much better thanks to the Bing search engine in the background, but I started to think, what was the point of this switch as I was basically pumping my data into another tech giant? Yeah, I helped plant some trees, but I didn’t fix my problem with ads and privacy.
Then I found Kagi
More and more times I was seeing the name Kagi in Reddit posts, which were sounding too good to be true. I started to be curious. How this “no name” search engine, which I was hearing for the first time, can be better than Google?
Kagi is providing a trial version, which is giving potential lurking people like me 100 searches to try what is all fuss about. And boy, it was enough for me to subscribe to the Starter plan a few days after I initially started with my trial testing.
Subscribe? Yes! Kagi is a paid service which is providing a completely personalised search engine full of small life-improving features and as a bonus you will receive privacy and ad-free experience.
The absence of advertisements immediately changes the vibe of the entire search results page. You don’t see any sponsored links to shady websites or e-shop ads. You don’t have to ignore the first several items, as you often do on Google results pages. In the case of Kagi, it’s the opposite. It’s very possible that your search query will be answered in the first 2-3 search results, which are genuine finds and not paid ads.
What is so special about Kagi?
Personal ranking system
Your search results page can be tailored to your needs. Do you prefer results from some websites over others, such as Wikipedia or Reddit? You can prioritize them. Simply click on the shield icon next to them and choose the ‘Rise’ option, which will prioritise results from these pages in your future searches.
It also works the other way around. Do you want to lower the ranking of results from e-shops like Amazon? Then choose the ‘Lower’ option, and you will see these results less often on your results page. And if you particularly dislike certain pages, such as paywalled content or social media like TikTok and Twitter, you can block them entirely from your search results using the ‘Block’ option.
Bangs & Snaps
Bangs are features that allow you to add additional parameters to your search query in a specific format, such as ‘!r’. This bang searches only on Reddit. For example, if you want to search for the best MacBook sleeves, you can use the query ‘!r best MacBook sleeve’, and you will be automatically directed to Reddit search results for sleeve recommendations from fellow Redditors. Bangs are useful when you want to search specific pages. Since these searches are performed on external webpages, they are not counted towards your prepaid Kagi Search quota. There are several prepared bangs, such as ‘!r’ for Reddit, ‘!yt’ for YouTube, and ‘!w’ for Wikipedia. However, each Kagi user can create their own custom bangs in their settings.”
But what if some pages do not have a search functionality? For these cases, we have Snaps! It works similarly to Bangs. You need to fill in your query with a specific parameter, which in the case of Snaps looks like this: ‘@r’ for example for Reddit. The difference between Bangs and Snaps is that Snaps involve searches performed by Kagi within their indexes, and the results are provided as regular search results by Kagi. These searches count towards your Kagi search quota.
Lenses
Lenses are another feature that can simplify the path to our desired results. The philosophy behind them is to focus your search on specific sites. Kagi provides several default lenses, which focus, for example, on Programming, Recipes, or Forums. Of course, anyone can create their own lenses, where it is possible to specify websites, keywords, file types, or date ranges.
And much more
I like about Kagi that even when they have AI features, they are not trying to push them in my face. For the Starter plan, only the ‘Quick Summary’ is available, but for higher tiers, a large list of LLMs is available via the Kagi Assistant to help with research. Sympathetic is also when Kagi is trying to hide AI generated images to provide better results, and they are also trying to similar things with video results to lower impact of clickbait titles or thumbnails on children in Family plans.
So how much?
The Starter plan, which includes 300 searches, is available for $5 plus tax per month. Initially, I thought that 300 searches would be too low for my usage, so I was restricting myself. However, I later realized that I had a different problem: my search quota was not being used up during the month, and I was losing the remainder each month. The solution is to pay annually ($54 plus tax per year), as this provides a full year’s quota of 3,600 searches upfront. This means you have enough searches for any occasional search spree, and none of your quota will be lost during the year.
Additional plans are Professional ($10 plus tax per month / $108 plus tax per year) with unlimited searches or Ultimate plan ($25 plus tax per month / $270 plus tax per year) which includes also Kagi AI Assistant.
There are also Family & Team plans for people who are interested in them.