Replacing Google Search with Kagi

Kagi is a paid search engine, and I’ve been using it for about three months now.

I like, and I will continue using it. It’s not only that it’s a competitor with Google (hooray underdog!), but it actually provides some features that I use.

Quality of results

The quality of the search results are really good. When I first made the switch I was very skeptical of the overall quality of the results.

In the beginning I almost always made a similar search on Google to compare the quality, and after only a week or two did I realize that I wouldn’t need to do that anymore.

Blocking and ranking pages

Certain websites I just do not want to visit, like content farms. For Google, that required an addon. With Kagi, that feature is built-in.

I can also change the prominence of certain pages to appear higher or lower in the results. For instance, I am trying to reduce my reliance on Reddit, so I made that page appear lower in my results.

Not only that, but I can also see on a glance if a website has a lot of trackers — something I really appreciate.

I generally only use normal and image search, but not the other types (news, books), so my experience might be a bit skewed towards that. At least I can out-out of any AI suggestions.

Yikes

One thing that left a sour taste in my mouth is Kagi’s advertising for their cheapest tier, which grant you 300 searches per month for $5. When I wanted to try it out, I went for this option.

I don’t know if it’s because I’m a power user, but my searched dried up within the first two weeks.

One statement they make regarding their lowest tier is the following:

The average Google user searches three or four times per day or about 100 times per month.

The source for this claim is this website, but I can’t find anything here that suggests anything of the kind.

I guess Kagi’s strategy worked. I did try it out because of the low price in conjunction with their claims, and now I pay for their middle tier.

Final words

I am happy with the switch, and I’ll continue using it for the foreseeable future.

There are other alternatives out there. The only one I’d consider switching to is probably DuckDuckGo. Unfortunately, I haven’t used it in many years, so I can’t comment on its quality.

Although not strictly “search”, I do find myself falling back to Google for its maps feature. Kagi isn’t there yet, and it feels like it’ll be a long time before they’ll catch up.