A few months ago—maybe more than a year?—I was watching a Geohotz livestream when at some point he used Kagi, a paid search engine (it has a free tier).
I was already pretty tired of Google Search and other search engines, and they weren’t even including the new AI slop at the top at that time.
Paying for a search engine was a pretty weird thought, but I gave it a try just to see if it would stick, and… I’ve been paying since then.
There are three points where I see value:
- No ads. I’d accept one ad, and maybe another one on the right in a sidebar, but the Google Search situation was too much to handle.
- Better search results. Being a paid product, their focus stays on giving value to the user, so their ranking feels way better than Google Search’s.
- Powerful and customizable. They offer “lenses,” which are preconfigured parameters that let you search faster, for example, only for PDFs. You can create custom lenses to use whenever you want.
They also offer other tools like the summarizer, which I use from time to time to summarize threads in forums.
I’d recommend it. They do offer a generous free tier, but I pay because I exhaust the monthly searches most months.