Privacy

I realize that this post sounds like I'm shilling for Kagi, so I'll say up front that I have no affiliation with them whatsoever. I'm just a satisfied customer. I’ll also fully admit that I don’t know much about the controversies or privacy issues other people are referencing. So look at others’ replies for that. I'll be doing my research about it too.

From a purely search perspective, I don’t really use their customizations. I don't need to. It far and away beats any competition in my experience. I’ve used it for over a year now, and will probably never switch off of it. Every month or two, when I have to use a different browser or machine that has DuckDuckGo, Startpage, or Brave, I get frustrated within a few minutes of searching. Maybe some self-hosted stuff can compete, but I haven't tried any of them for any length of time. Of the handful of people I've recommended it to IRL, they all switched over permanently.

But general praise isn’t worth anything without an explanation, so here is a long-winded one.

1. Lenses are awesome! Of the ones I use the most:

   • Forums is a much better version of appending "reddit" to a search.
   • PDFs comes in handy for me specifically. I read a lot of papers, and it is very good at skipping past annoying sign in, click through four buttons, and go through a captcha to get to the pdf.
   • Academic is a good supplement to Google Scholar. I still use scholar as my main search for academic sources since I don't want to miss any papers that other people will find. But Kagi often finds some relevant papers that don't appear high up Google Scholar.

2. The amount of AI slop, SEO-optimized articles on other search engines is just abhorrent. I'm not sure how they do it, but Kagi does an amazing job at cutting them out. I no longer fear searching for "best vacuums for hard floors" or whatever. The results that come up are actual good review sites (Consumer Reports, Rtings.com, specific websites dedicated to vacuum reviews) and sometimes useful Reddit posts. On other search engines (at least back when I switched to Kagi), I only got AI generated listicles of what are the first 10 results on Amazon with "reviews" that are just rewordings of the amazon descriptions.

3. I know AI in search is controversial, but I think the "Quick Answer" feature is done very tastefully. I do think there are searches where AI summaries can be helpful, efficient, and unlikely to be inaccurate. The button doesn't feel intrusive, and I'll end up clicking it about 1/10 searches.

4. I like the little shield on the right side that gives you an insight into how many ads/trackers a site has. It's another thing that can help you make better choices on which websites to go to. Not a huge thing, but I like it.

5. I'll admit this one is less precise, but I feel like search results are much closer to what I'm actually looking for. When I'm searching for something very specific, the results are exactly what I want, not tangential.

Summary: For my personal day-to-day searches, Kagi is a no-brainer. It make searching easy and frictionless again. It's what I'd expect a good search engine to be like in 2026. And I think it's worth paying for a service when it provides value, especially when you aren't the product.