At the end of October, I handed over $11 USD to “Premium” search engine Kagi, partially as an experiment, and partially with a hope for a better search experience.
Why on earth would anyone pay for searching online? take your pick of Google, Bing or DuckDuckGo, right? I’ve been on the Internet since it’s very early days, and searching the web has changed a lot in that time, perhaps even more so in the last 3 years, and not for the better. I needed something to change.
Article note: This post is link-heavy and it is strongly recommended that you read the links to obtain additional insights and contexts
Sparing you all the history lesson here (but Wikipedia as always has a good timeline), search engines used to be things where you could search for keywords or later, phrases, and fairly reliably get a link to a useful site. In recent years though the top results you get from the major search engines these days are getting less and less useful due to search engine optimisation (SEO) and sites written by Generative AI, all performing an elaborate link dance to rise to the top of the results. I am not even going to touch on promoted sites and realtime result brokerages here that further manipulate those first results.
In short, top search results are now the realm of the highest bidder and my recent experiences have been less about getting the answer to a question, and more about how something can be achieved by using the top bidder’s product.
The Age of PageRank is Over – Kagi
Enter Kagi
When a friend first mentioned Kagi was a search engine to me, my first response was “No it’s not”. If you have been on the Internet as long as I have, you will remember Kagi as an e-commerce gateway for software developers. I remember purchasing a wavetable emulator to play MIDI files through Kagi in the late 90s when sound cards often only had a synthesiser chip not capable of true instrument reproduction. That version of Kagi shut down on July 31, 2016.
However as a search engine, this warranted investigation.
The Kagi documentation talks about why you should consider paying for search on a modern internet and it makes some compelling points. The old adage that if something is offered for free on the internet means that you are the product still rings true. I was surprised to learn that google makes close to $300 USD per year per user in influenced search revenue.
What Does Paying for Search Get You?
Kagi likes to say that paying for search puts the control back in the end user’s hands – no more sponsored posts, no more embedded advertisements, no more link tracking and a you get the control the ranking algorithms.
I’d like to tell you that you are going to try Kagi and the search results will all be sunshine & butterflies compared to traditional search engines but the truth is out-of-the-box theres a good change that the top 5 results from Kagi will be the same top 5 results of other search engines. Where the differences begin are in the next 5 results, or as you start changing the rank weightings for sites.
Here’s an example of changing rank weights. I don’t care for crypto coin news, so I am able to click on the shield to the right of the result, which brings up’s Kagi’s information on the site, and I have chosen to lower the rank for my results.
It’s been quite liberating to entirely block sites that I have zero interest in (Pinterest, WebMD, TikTok, Breitbart and Fox News). While there are browser web extensions to omit sites from results, there is no way to raise or lower algorithm weightings.
Another thing of interest is the search results themselves. Searching for “Black Friday” returns “About 5,920,000,000 results” on Google. Kagi returns “98 relevant results”. Kagi says the following about this difference :
“This is, in part, because ad supported search engines have different incentives and want you to stay on their site longer, going through pages and pages of results, as every interaction is another opportunity to serve ads.”
Thinking about it, it’s hard to argue. I can’t count the number of times I have ended up several pages deep on other search engines trying to find specific information, while all the time the search engine is serving ads and tracking clicks.
Another thing that is very welcome is I am yet to come across the repetitive generative AI articles that I so frequently see elsewhere, where the article follows the same formulaic structure for each site I visit. Reading the same content with minor differences across different sites is a frustrating waste of time.
Applying a Lens
A feature that particularly got my attention was being able to apply search lenses to results. Lenses are a way of narrowing down results to particular groups of sites or pages with keywords when searching for a particular topic.
As an example, a normal search for “Microsoft Remote Desktop” will return a results telling me all about MS Remote Desktop, where I can download remote desktop clients and how to connect to windows remotely. Turning on the cybersecurity lens and the results for vulnerabilities, how to better secure RDP and other cybersecurity news that mentioned MS RDP.
Cybersecurity Lens
You can use the built in lenses, or you can craft your own. These I am finding particularly useful in narrowing down the search to some niche information.
A Custom Experience
Kagi brings plenty of appearance customisation to the table to further tailor your experience:
Most obviously, you can adjust the kagi appearance to suit you, with font size, colour themes, and results display. You can event apply custom CSS if you wish.
Being able to adjust what widgets are displayed in results however is fantastic. Quite often I was frustrated by other search engines immediately displaying me a list of Youtube videos, followed by lists of related search results or what other people have searched on when I just want the web page results for what I searched for. I can switch that all on and off here.
There is much more to Kagi’s settings, but you can read about them in the documentation here.
Can’t I Just Do This With Existing Search Engines?
There’s no denying that you could implement similar functionality with traditional search engines for zero cost.
- The “Big 3” search engines (Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo) will provide varying levels of appearance customisation and limited search result customisation.
- Web extensions are available to do the things that the search engines won’t, such as blocking particular results, changing the appearance through CSS and removing tracking information from search results.
- Ad blockers will help in removing trackers and advertisement elements on pages.
- Lenses can be imitated using the “site:” modifier in search queries.
However, this requires you have the ability to install and maintain the web extensions and ad blockers, or honestly be a developer if you want to start playing with CSS. Often, these things will not synchronise across devices (especially in the Apple environment).
Kagi just works, I can go to the site, do the thing an not need to have all these extra bits installed to give me the experience I want.
A Month Later
Over the course of a month, I have made just under 500 searches using Kagi. This easily puts me in the “Professional Plan” range of $11 USD/mo, as opposed to the basic plan for half that price, but limited to 300 searches/month and some feature restrictions.
Most of these searches have occurred on my home computer, with a smaller amount split between my mobile devices and work laptop. I would probably use Kagi a more for work if the web browser was not administratively locked to use Google as a default search provider 🙂
Closing Thoughts – Worth The Money?
You’ve made it this far, and no doubt this is the question you want me to answer – do I think it’s worth the money.
The short answer is Yes – but only just.
Personally I think it is a touch on the expensive side due to the $AUD exchange rate being terrible right now. I think if it was up to about $14 AUD/mo, the Professional plan would be worth the money. The value I get from this is the “better” search results and ability to use lenses and adjust rank weights.
If you are the kind of person who only cares about the top 5 results in a search engine and aren’t bothered by promoted links, tracking and generative AI articles then Kagi probably is not for you.
If you are seeking a nuanced search engine where you can have greater control over the search experience, and you feel uncomfortable with how your search data may be used for tracking and advertising, maybe it’s time to give Kagi a look.
Kagi offers a 100 search trial before you need to choose a plan.