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?
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.