Hey sorry if this has been asked before. I checked and didn’t see any posts, but basically is the kagi search engine worth it? I’m gearing up to cancel Hulu/spotify so I’ll have a little more money in the monthly budget and Kagi is one of the things I’m considering
Currently I use DuckDuckGo and it’s pretty good for me, but the main thing that makes me interested in Kagi is the ability to rank websites so they appear more or less often and the filter by type like academic sources or Reddit only.
I don’t really like ai stuff (not inherently, it’s just shoved into everything so I’ve come to hate it) but it seems pretty unobtrusive in Kagi?
I want to hear from people who actually pay for and use Kagi. Is the 300 searches a month enough for you or do most of you need the unlimited search plan? I know about the free trial but I want to know about the long term user experience
Edit: Thank you to everyone who responded!! I learned a lot about Kagi and I think I’m gonna end up getting the 300/mo plan and see if it’s enough for me. Thanks again! <3
I’m on the bottom plan. It works fine for me.
AI stuff is available, but you can also just turn it off and never see it.
The search results seem to have less garbage in them than DDG. I’m not sure if Kagi is putting more effort into their index or if they’re just not being targeted as much by junk websites. Likely both.
Letting users promote and demote domains helps individuals search results and gives them a lot of information for which sites are garbage too
That’s good to hear bc $5 is way easier for me to justify than $10. Thank you!
DDG uses Bing’s index I believe, so they’re just reranking results for you + proxying queries. The big indexes are generally low quality and DDG can show you only results from them. Kagi seems to train theirs on small web and uses user rankings to adjust, which helps a lot.
They are not without issues, they’ve been pushing for open indexing as indexing is getting harder due to AI scrapers. Cloudflare and Reddit for example make it much harder now (Reddit has an exclusivity deal with Google), but I do get results from both.