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.
Hmm. I might pay $30/year but this still seems much too expensive for me.
That’s what I thought at first but it saves me so much time in searching and filtering through poor results. The website results are prioritized by being noncommercial and to your preferences, no ad ridden ai articles. You can remove paywall sites from results too.
If you don’t search much they have a limited number of searches version for $5 per month. But yeah if you are struggling financially or live in a poor country this is still expensive.
I just do searches like maybe 4 times a day on average. And i’m by no means poor but even $60/year seems a bit much.
Edit:. Eh, i went ahead and subscribed, we’ll see how it goes. Initially tests were pretty good.
IMO, a search engine costing similar as a streaming service just feels expensive. Makes me want to see a cost breakdown.
I’m hopeful that this price reduction means they are reaching critical masses to make their product more cost effective. I like the idea of it a lot.
It feels expensive because we have become used to free search. That free search is paid by tracking, ads, referrals, and promoting certain results.
Instead of showing you what you are actually looking for, they are just trying to maximize profits off of your search. Giving you what you are looking for is an afterthought.
Kagi does post about financials on their blog. For example this is older but they were actually losing money per search despite the previous higher cost. I was surprised they were able to drop the price so much since they were losing money before.
https://blog.kagi.com/status-update-first-three-months#financials