I’ve been quite disappointed with both Google and DuckDuckGo for a while and have been thinking there should be something better. When Kagi started gaining attention, I became interested. The introduction of Googles lie-generator in Norway gave me the motivation to finally change.
Kagi is a search engine designed to re-humanize the web. They aim to provide users with tools to avoid ads and user tracking. Therefore, it’s a paid service, not an ad-financed one. I try to stay away from recommendation algorithms and content pushed by advertisements, so Kagi fits perfectly there.
Kagi has a good blog post or manifesto on why they exist here: The Age of PageRank is Over
Creating a search engine is not free. Using Google, you pay by being pushed advertising and other scammy junk. Using Kagi, you have to pay from your own pocket. Interesting figures from Kagi’s FAQ:
To estimate the revenue per user, we can divide the 2023 US ad revenue by the 2023 number of users: $76 billion / 274 million = $277 revenue per user in the US or $23 USD per month, on average! That means there is someone, somewhere, a third party and a complete stranger, an advertiser, paying $23 per month for your searches.
My first impression of Kagi is very good. I’ve used it for a working week and over the weekend, and it has found good answers for my queries related to go and SQLite. It responds very quickly and I usually find what I’m looking for in the top 3. I should have made all my searches on Google, DuckDuckGo, and Kagi and compared them, but that is too much work.
One significant thing I’ve noticed is that the quality of websites linked by Kagi is much better than Google has provided in recent years. Google sends you to a lot of junk sites, pages that have SEO-ed their way to the top and serve ads, pop-ups, and other nonsense. Kagi doesn’t do that. Kagi does the opposite by demoting pages with a lot of advertising.
Our unique algorithms down-rank pages with a lot of ads and trackers (which we have found correlate with a decrease in content quality) and promote content from independent, ad-free sources and personal websites. Sourxe
I recommend trying Kagi! It’s free to try out, and after the trial they have a pretty generous payment model in my opinion.