1y ago

Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month | Kagi Blog

blog.kagi.com Unlimited Kagi searches for $10 per month | Kagi Blog

This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).

Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.

Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:

Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
"Lenses", which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type "!yt" in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more

This blog post goes into full details about Kagi's capabilities.

47 comments

I'm intrigued, but I don't want to login to a search engine :/
- 100% this. I'm willing to pay for searches, but I'm not willing to get myself tracked and pay for the privilege.
  If they did some sort of microtransaction thing, like send a small amount of monero, get a couple searches for a session. That work for me. Then it would be completely ephemeral.
  If they worked out a deal with mullvad where connections from all that get low priority searches, that would also work. Cuz I trust movad to be an intermediary to obscure the payer from the search.
  If you could pay them and get an onion URL, for your paid searches. It's not perfect, but it would at least break the connection between the payer and the searches. Though it's more bulky and easier to correlate multiple searches to a single person at least would be a start.

EDIT BEINGS HERE
So I actually watched a talk by the person who coinded "enshittification", Cory Doctorow, recently, and I have changed my perspective about Kagi. I no longer think Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
Enshittification requires advertisers. As long as Kagi finances itself with money that does not come from advertisers, it will not enshittify.
This does not mean that it's not problematic that their code is closed-source.
EDIT ENDS HERE
I like what I hear about the user experience, but there are many problems I see with the service.
For one, it's based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification. Currently, it is giving users loads of stuff so that users use it, but sooner or later investors will want their money back and Kagi will enshittify.
Finally, these two problems would be mitigated by open-sourcing and making libre their software. With that, alternatives in more sensible legislatures could open. Users could migrate to instances that are still libre and not enshittified.
It is really unfortunate that Kagi is doing so many things well while doing some fundamental things terribly. As it stands, Kagi is doomed to enshittify.
- For one, it’s based in the USA, so it is legally subject to the insane, antidemocratic, and awful state surveillance there.
  https://kagi.com/privacy at least sounds pretty good.
  It is also a corporation, so it is subject to enshittification.
  https://blog.kagi.com/safe-round this sound good as well.
  The part that I don't get is how they can match Google in terms of search results quality when Microsoft couldn't even get close with Bing and a heck of a lot more time and money.
  
  Easy. Kagi cares about the quality of their product giving you the customer good results. Their product is a search engine. Google doesn't care to make their search engine better currently. Their product is ad placement and sales. You are not their customer.
  Kagi already exceeds Google at being a search engine, at this time.
  
  Don't think you will find a better search engine than Kagi. They can't even see what queries users are running, according to their own comments.

Does Kagi support languages outside of English? One issue I have with DDG is the lack of results outside English sites. If Kagi is similar then it would be a big issue.

Why on earth would I pay $10 a month for search when I can get everything I need using SearXNG? For Free.
It costs me exactly $0.00 to run SearXNG locally using Podman and WSL to host the docker image. It Just Works; and I don't have to worry about paying money every month to anyone; nor do I ever have to count my search queries as precious.
Unfortunately this "$10/month = Unlimited" is also likely to be available only for a limited time; and once Kagi feels it has enough users; then you'll be stuck back on some arbitrary number of searches each month.
Worse is logging in. To search. Yuck.
There are so many "Public" SearXNG instances as well for the less-than-technical; https://searx.space/
All of them provide the option(s) to use whatever engines you'd like.
- Kagi has better search results than any other engine I've used. That is why people pay for it.
  
  No it doesn't. SearXNG aggregates all engines anyways; and that gets far more helpful results.

Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
Also it's automatically not private when it requires a login. They know exactly what user is searching what, and basically breaks search in incognito mode. Also people love more accounts to manage.
"If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
If you really want to pay while not having to login, self-host a searx instance and you'll be logging your own data. You'll have complete control, it's significantly cheaper, and it's far more private without having to even login.
- "If it's free then you're the product" isn't even true when search engines are ad supported, so stick with the much better free alternatives.
  This is exactly what "you're the product" means. Google is selling your presence on their platform to advertisers - you are the product they're selling.
  
  My comment says search engines. I specifically said that because I was not including Google. I know you specifically mentioned Google because other privacy search engines prove what you say as false. By that logic literally everything with consumers is a product, that's such a vague statement.
- No ads disguised as search results. Actually, no ads at all. Great search results. Lenses.
  Also, there is a solution for incognito mode. And ad supported, in practice means tracked by advertisers, and hence you are the product.
  
  DDG proves literally all of that false. Also just use AdBlock with it. Elaborate on it working in private browsing without needing to login.
- what search engines are actually good these days?
  because that's the problem, they aren't
  search results have gone down a sharp hill lately
  I don't think Kagi is the answer, but there is a problem - a big one
- Why the hell would you pay for search when the free competitors are just better
  Providing the service is not free, especially something like search that uses a LOT of storage and compute power to index websites. That's very expensive to do. There's two options as to how to pay for it:
  Pay for it yourself (like what Kagi is doing)
  Have someone else pay for it for you. For example, advertising like what Google and Bing do
  The latter is what people mean when they say "you're the product". The advertisers are the customers.
  self-host a searx instance
  Two totally different things.
  Searx is a search engine aggregation service. It is not a search engine itself, and you still need the backend search engines to make it useful. Searx could use Kagi though.
  
  Kagi doesn't index, it's Google results as a proxy. That's literally what Searx does, and it's free. The issues you said with needing to pay for search is solved with Searx even if you claim it doesn't, it does. Also other search engines like DDG does a crawler + bing results is funded by ads, they're profitable. The mental gymnastics to pay for a shitty service makes no sense to me, but you do you if you want to support this terrible practice. Not to mention the numerous other issues I listed that you ignored.
  Searx could use Kagi though.
  Lol that makes no sense, and it probably violates Kagi's ToS. You're running a self hosted proxy through a service that's just a proxy for Google results. Just set Searx to search Google for the exact same thing.
  "If you aren't paying for something, you are the product" sounds nice, but isn't true. Advertisment can exist and you can still not the product.
  Instead it somehow makes more sense to pay for a privacy invasive search engine that requires a login, requires cookies, and doesn't work in private search.

That's a curious project and I hope they succeed. But I have to wonder. On their "Why pay for search engines" page, they state the following:
Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search itself has a non-zero cost. In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches (wherever in the world you search from). So a user searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3 in search cost. But an average Kagi user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use.
So, will they dial the price back up or do they currently just hope that most people pay for the "unlimited searches per month" plan but use it less than an average user would?
- Their operations are very small scale still. I imagine as the economy of scale does its thing, that price/search will fall drastically.

This is fantastic. I've been a $5 Kagi user for a few months and have been really enjoying it. The only issue has been that sometimes when I'm working on a project I need to blow through a ton of similar queries to find what I'm looking for; I've been forced to switch back to google for those. Now I've upgraded and am going full Kagi.

Just heard of this service but I am signing up first thing tomorrow.

Awesome! The AI summarizer is very useful, and it gives quality search results from my experience with the free trial. $10 a month still seems a little high for a search engine, though I'm definitely eyeing it more now...
Hopefully we see more competition in the future with paid search engines, this seems to be new territory where everyone is still pretty unsure of the right pricing. I think $5 a month is going to be the sweet spot for me.
- Same here. I did the trial 300 search thing and was very happy with that. Settling on the fiver a month plan as I can't justify a tenner. Plus I realised that I don't do much more than about 300 searches.
  It's so refreshing to not have 'sponsored' posts or adverts in front of your results.

Ah this is fantastic! I've only been using Kagi for a few months, and have been concerned about running into the search limit, but this means I can go and set it as the default everywhere now.

Does anyone have experience with non-english searches? Are the results of similar quality?

Hadn’t heard of this but stoked to try it out!

Oh sick!! I was already on the $10/month plan. This is great news!!!

Same. Looks like you and I both will be getting unlimited searches now. :D

Samesies :P This is awesome. Love being a user and not the product. EDIT:

With the redirector extension you can import the following to help with muscle memory.

 undefined

    
{
    "createdBy": "Redirector v3.5.3",
    "createdAt": "2023-09-22T00:00:00.631Z",
    "redirects": [
       {
            "description": "Google->Kagi",
            "exampleUrl": "https://www.google.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks&amp;sca_esv=011101111&amp;source=dv&amp;ei=CN",
            "exampleResult": "https://kagi.com/search?q=kagi%20rocks",
            "error": null,
            "includePattern": ""^(?:https?):\\/\\/(?:www\\.)?google\\.com(\\/?$|(\\/search\\?q=.*?(?=[&amp;])))"",
            "excludePattern": "",
            "patternDesc": "Redirect Kagi",
            "redirectUrl": "https://kagi.com$1",
            "patternType": "R",
            "processMatches": "noProcessing",
            "disabled": false,
            "grouped": false,
            "appliesTo": [
                "main_frame"
            ]
        },
    ]
}

47 comments