Why You Should Give Kagi A Try

Kagi is the hip new player entering the search engine market. I've been using it for a bit more than a year now. And though it's very unlike me, I want to promote their service and get you to try them out.

I'm not being paid for this or anything, so why am I such a fan girl—for a search engine of all things!? I typically don't gush about any TV shows or films, and especially not about (tech!) companies, but Kagi just does some things so right that I want to support them by advertising their product.

Wait, It's Paid?

Let's talk about the elephant in the room. Kagi is a paid search engine. They'll set you back about 10€ per month on the annual plan¹. That's probably 10€/month more than you are paying right now. Compared to streaming services it's an okay price, but it's "just" search. Is it really worth that? What can they offer that free search can't?

The main selling points I've heard around Kagi don't seem worth the price: privacy and an ad-free experience. Sure, if you've been using Google, then you might be swayed by this, but I had been using DuckDuckGo for years already. They put privacy first and my ad blocker successfully hid all the ads. And all that was free.

But the thing that convinces me to pay for Kagi is a direct result of it being a paid search engine: It is putting users first.

User-Centric Design

You've heard it a million times: If you don't pay for the product, you're the product. Sure. But when using DuckDuckGo, I did not really experience myself being productized. That's why I thought that I would feel no difference switching to Kagi. How wrong I was!

Paying for a product means that the product is tailored to you. Kagi receives regular updates that are transparently communicated in their changelog. If the product doesn't serve you, either because there's a bug or because there's a feature missing, you can open an issue. And the team will actually join the discussion, will fix bugs, and might implement your feature request.

You are a customer, and the team at Kagi is working to keep you happy.

When I signed up, their basic search was already decent, and they had some nice features which I will highlight in a moment. But since then, they've also added some filtering to image results that tries to remove "AI" generated images. They've improved video search on TikTok. They've developed Kagi translate and added a link to translate search results. They've introduced the option to display video titles in all lowercase rather than the often all-caps clickbait.

That's not all they did in the year—there's lots more—so let me highlight a couple of killer features that make using Kagi not only productive, but also a joy to use.

The Really Good Stuff

As I alluded to earlier, my personal favorite features do not follow the same order as Kagi's own marketing materials or what others write about.

Bangs & Snaps

The first feature that I use multiple times a day is bangs and snaps. These can be added to any query to specify a site (or multiple sites) to search. Let's say you're looking for information on the film "Harakiri." Instead of simply searching for Harakiri, you can include a bang in your search like this: Harakiri !imdb. This will open the IMDb search results for the query Harakiri. Obviously, it doesn't have to be !imdb. There's literally thousands of bangs for all kinds of different sites: !r for Reddit, !yt for YouTube, etc.

Searching for Harakiri !wiki (for Wikipedia) does not work as we'd like, though. It brings up Wikipedia's entry on Seppuku, redirected from Harakiri. We wanted the movie, but Wikipedia's search (unlike IMDb) will always open the top result. That's where snaps come in. When we search for Harakiri @wiki (with an @ instead of a !), Kagi returns this page. It's their own search, confined to the domain associated with the bang. Here we can find the film we're looking for as the second result.

Is this impossible in other search engines? Not really. The whole idea was stolen from DuckDuckGo (!ddg), who came up with bangs. Mozilla Firefox natively allows you to add custom search shortcuts. Using a redirect extension, you could parse the search URLs of any search site and redirect them to other sites. So it's not impossible. Where Kagi has a leg up is that their bangs are already there and that you can easily add your own.

Domain Ranking

The second exciting feature is the ability to rank domains. Next to each search result is a little shield icon that brings up some information when clicked. One point in there is your personal ranking of that domain². The two extreme options are to block the domain completely from showing up in results or to pin it to always show up on top. Then there's weaker versions of both that lower or raise results from that domain in your future searches.

The Leaderboard can give you a good idea for what might be useful to pin or block. Commonly blocked sites include "social media" like TikTok, Facebook, or Pinterest, "news" sites ranging from racist (Breitbart) to plain bad (MSN), and sites infamous for terrible content like Quora, Wikihow, or w3schools. On the other hand, commonly raised or pinned sites include Wikipedia, Reddit, IMDb (or other movie sites), and lots of coding blogs and forums—this really shows us what kind of person the early adopter of Kagi is.

Personally, I've blocked zola.com because it kept showing up when I was searching for documentation around my blogging software zola. I've pinned Merriam Webster because it's my favorite dictionary. I've raised premium news sites that I own a subscription to, as I'd obviously want to read relevant news from them over other sites.

Lenses

In other lists, this is often very high up. I don't really agree, but I recently found a good use for them. But first, what is a "Lens"?

A lens is a list of (up to 10) websites to include in search results³. So you turn on the lens, type your search, and are served with results from your predefined list. Kagi's predefined lenses are categories like "Recipes," "Academic," or "Programming." But basic search is already so good that I did not really see the point in using lenses. Either I'll include a keyword like recipe in the query, or, if I want to be very specific, I'll include a bang.

But then I had an aha-moment: This feature is great for sites that don't have their own search and are too niche to show up high in regular results. The first one for me was to create a lens called "me" that's just my own websites. If I want to link someone to a post of mine, I can simply search Pen and Paper !me and find my posts and web-apps. Similarly, I can create a lens for the blogs I regularly read to re-find links to their posts or discover whether they've previously written about a topic I'm newly interested in.

(No) "AI"

"AI" is a fake industry. Most people don't care for it. And while Kagi does have some "AI" powered functionality, it's never forced upon you and always hidden behind at least one extra click.

If you want a shortened version⁴ of a website, you click the three-dot menu next to the result and select "Summarize Page". If you want an "AI" assisted translation of a site, that's also a button next to the result. From other search engines, you might know the generated "quick answer" that sits at the top of each result page. If you want it, you can invoke it by ending your Kagi search query with a question mark.

In my view, this is the best way to handle it. Every couple of weeks I have a sort of tip-of-the-tongue search query, where I think "AI" really excels, like "pc game rpg with mobile phone as controller with information asymmetry?"

And all the rest of the time it's out of sight.

Doggo

He's just so cute!

Search

Lastly, the search itself. When I switched from DuckDuckGo, I did not immediately notice a huge difference. If you're not used to the first results being sponsored ads, you might have a similarly underwhelming experience. It's decent, and always getting better, but if you aren't utilizing the features above, you'll not be blown away and might question the 10€/month investment.

But Kagi's search is a very solid base that can be expanded and customized through bangs, snaps, ranking domains, custom lenses, and very selective use of "AI" here and there. It's being actively developed in your interest and the changes are communicated transparently.

Conclusion

Paying for search does not mean that you get the same experience as a free search engine, but now it also costs you money. No. Paying for search changes the whole relationship between user, provider, search, and advertisers (the latter now being completely absent). It changes whom the provider is beholden to, their priorities, and ultimately search itself.

Will Kagi last forever? Probably not. But right now, they are here and they are really good. Search is still the gateway to the internet, why not pay for it? And if you're quick, you might get in in time for the 50k Kagi surprise. At the 20k milestone every paying member got a T-shirt for free. And I'm not kidding when I say it's so good. It's got the cute doggo and is easily the comfiest T-shirt I own.

Thoughts? Reach out via Mastodon @Optional@dice.camp, message me via SimpleX, or shoot me an email.