this post was submitted on 12 Oct 2024
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I'm hesitant to say it because I've gotten some ridiculously hostile reactions for it, but I've really liked Kagi.
Yes, it's a subscription service but that means they have an incentive to not show you shit results. According to some, paying for a search service is wrong because online services should be free, and I'm just astroturfing if I even mention it
That's stupid. Personally I think that Kagi is just a bit too expensive and it feels like they're investing a lot into AI tools, features and external APIs that I have no interest in, which probably contributes to that high price.
If they had a $2-$3/month unlimited search only subscription without all the fluff I'd be game. But currently, using Google et al. with a good ad blocker still works well enough for me that I can't justify paying for yet another service costing almost as much as a Spotify or Netflix subscription each month.
When it came down to it I realised I use search many many many mores times a day than I do Netflix so it became a no brainer for me to use Kagi... it's funny my wife (who laughs at me for paying for search) was looking for a particular recipe yesterday and she was bouncing around Google unable to find exactly what she wanted... I put it into Kagi and it was literally the first item returned. She still laughs at me 🤷🏻♂️
What I will say is Kagi is pretty useless for local searching though, eg looking for a local business, Google is still much better at that but you can Google through Kagi to help protect privacy.
Couldn't you just pay for VPN and have the same benefit?
I think that is the basis of the reason people think that the whole thing is a bit weird. If you're already paying for a VPN, which presumably you are if you're the sort of person who pays for search, then you're already protected. So why do you also pay for search?
You sort of didn't read my whole post and just looked at the last bit - I pay for excellent search results with Kagi, the fact it's also private (because I pay) is a bonus. However for local searches, I find Kagi is a bit US centric, so a simple !g bang operator gives me a private search through Google which still excels at these types of things... for anyway, who knows what Kagi has up their sleeves 🤷🏻♂️
A VPN with Google would still give me rubbish Google search results and marginal privacy against Google's algorithms (their fingerprinting likely knows it's me anyway), and I'd need to keep switching it on and off to make full use of my 1gb/s cable internet speed.