I use it, I like it, though there is something in the back of my mind about the company that sets off alarm bells that I can’t quite put my finger on so I’m cautious. But I don’t mind the model of paying for online services in principle. I would say it’s about as good as DuckDuckGo was 10 years ago when it was still good (DDG has gone downhill like a lot of things in my opinion), and Kagi is the best search I can find now. I do research for work so I need the unlimited (middle) tier since I use a lot of search, I consider it reasonable value for money. I suggest doing the free trial and see how long it takes to run out before deciding which tier to choose.

I blow through 300 in less than a week.

Yes I’m happy with it. Kagi has AI features but I haven’t seen them, everything is opt-in. pushing that on me would be a deal breaker.

I have been using Kagi for over two years and I love it. Worth it IMHO.

I paid for the lower plan for a while. It didn’t have nearly enough searches included for my use, and the higher plan was too expensive. Especially since I just wanted search, none of the other products they were busy developing.

Search results were good. Recently I’m using Qwant and I’m happy with that as well, so right now I don’t miss having access to Kagi at all. With the limited number of searches it was more of an inconvenience than a benefit the period I was using it.

There are some questionable things about Kagi. A few years ago the CEO reeked out this tweet showcasing how their AI could call out the BBC for being too mean to Elon Musk, which is honestly enough of a red flag for me to steer clear.

I do not regret it.

I don’t really use the bangs to use Google instead like I did on duck duck go. I think I’ve used them a few times in a year, and heat when I was deep into not finding something which I continued to not find on google.

I haven’t had to rerank sites in a while

You can get the AI answers if you append a question mark to your query, or you can use !ki to use the AI researcher tool. It’s all opt in. They’ll also tell you how much of your AI budget you’ve used.

Under the good Kagi is an “AI” search engine using BERT architecture, which is similar to Google (it takes your natural language question and searches that, instead of classical keyword based search). That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work or doesn’t respect keywords, but sometimes you do have to quote keyword groups to enforce them.

I’m pretty sure their index is built at a higher quality than Google who are trying to answer every low quality query and maximize metrics.

Yes.

100%

Been using it well over a year, maybe two?

It’s in my top5 of subscriptions I’ll cancel last if money is tight.

It’s what Google used to be - at least for the stuff I look for. YMMV, get the cheapest version and try it out.

I’m in IT so my searches are primarily geared towards solving technical issues. I’ve no complaints. The summarizer is also nice if you don’t want to read four paragraphs for two sentences of information.

I use 30–40 searches per day, and I almost never need to bang to google. When I do bang to google, I consistently find worse result.

It is indeed expensive compare to most of the other donations/subscription I have, but there is really no alternative to this experience.

I use nebula, lemmy, mastodon, kagi, jellyfin, signal, thunderbird, fedora, and so on. Oh boy, let me tell you, my digital world is quite, there is nothing in my face pushing anything, and I get every update I need and gets things done. All of them cost money/donation, but I would rather spend money to save time and my mental health now…

I’ve been using Kagi for the last 2 years.

I use SearXNG for “easy” searches (eg: I know what I’m looking for or simply don’t know a URL by heart)

I use Kagi’s 300 search / month plan because for “harder” searches (eg: I have a problem I want to solve). I used to have the unlimited plan but it was not that worth for me and I dislike paying for AI features that I won’t use.

I love Kagi. It’s worth the cost to me, but I didn’t really love DuckDuckGo personally so maybe you would have a different experience?

My partner loves it; I have not been willing to change my habits to use it.

One thing that I appreciate about them as a business is that if you don’t use it for a month, they don’t charge you. The subscription stays active, but doesn’t cost you anything until you start using it again. Makes it a low-risk subscription to get! (Please confirm they still do this, but it is how it worked when he signed up!)

yes!!!

It made me enjoy the internet again. Back in the peak years, 2010 babayy!!

Pay the unlimited. Youll love it. My friends using hallucinating idiot chat bots are like woah how are you finding this (really cool, accurate , documented) information? And I’m like, the fucking internet we’ve had for 20 years that THEY are trying to destroy and take away from us.

For me, yes.

Had the family account for half a year or so… Ended up cancelling because I was the only one using it. And I find the personal unlimited tier too expensive for my use. I’ve been trotting around using all kinds of different search engines nowadays. Kagi is okay. But as you said they’re so heavily gearing into the AI stuff that it’s meh. Give me an AI free tier with unlimited searches and I’m back on board. I need the unlimited plan for my work, maybe I should trigger my boss again on this one.

If you can split the family plan with friends/family, the pricepoint suddenly becomes much more interesting. But all my friends laughed when I told them if they would join me on paying for search.