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.
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