Kagi is a subscription-based search engine that argues that paying for search is a reasonable thing to do in order to avoid ads and companies selling your information. They also have lenses, e.g. for searching the fediverse specifically. Anyone that wants to share their experience of using Kagi?
It’ll be tough for you to find a middle of the road review of this, because people either pay a monthly subscription fee, and are aware of this, and use it because otherwise they’d be wasting their money… or they don’t use, it and can’t really contribute.
Personally, I’ve been turned off by it for a couple reasons:
ETA: If you use Kagi, don’t rely on promises alone to keep your data private. Consider a masked email for login (you must provide one), and definitely use their Privacy Pass to keep your searches unlinked from your account instead.
This is very similar to my experience.
I was a Kagi user for around 3 years, didn’t really ran into issues looking up stuff, but also never really had to compare it with other search engines. I found answers to what I needed, and it was a passable answer. Don’t need much else from a search engine.
I left when they started investing my money into muddying search with AI. Yes, you can turn it off. But that still means I get way less worth for what I pay, because instead of focusing the respurces on making a better search engine, they are focusing on AI.
I found out I’m ok with just using DDG or recently Ecosia. Both have AI, I can turn it off, but at least I’m not paying for it so IDC. In the case of Ecosia, at least they have a greenwashing twist as a bonus so I can feel better about myself, lol.
EDIT: Just to make it clear, I kind of trust Ecosia in their mission and I respect what their goal is, but I’m having a hard time trusting a company that adds an OpenAI-based chatbot to their site. They might’ve already changed it, but when they rolled it out and I saw the sentence “Ask our Ecosiabot about how to be more enviromental friendly” literally right under “This chat is subjected to OpenAI privacy policy” is so extremely ironic I lost a lot of trust in them. But still, at least they are trying to greenwash a bit.
Thanks for reminding me about Ecosia. I hadn’t seen any of this, so I looked at their privacy policy and they actually refer to Mistral as if it is their exclusive provider:
But then, much farther down, they mention OpenAI.
My issue is mostly with their claim “we want and have the service we provide energy neutral”, vs " oh and we also use AI from companies that are using the power equivalent of a large city to power them".
Any enviromentaly conscious person should be against AI.
Yeah, found out that the company and its founder sounds a bit… interesting to say the least. Thanks for your input
That blog post was an interesting read. I didn’t really like that kagi doesn’t a offer a plan without any LLM but the handling of user data seems even worse.
Wow I did not expect to enjoy reading that blog post as much as I did. This Vlad dude comes off like a petulant child.