Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi

I like how the search engine is the product instead of <em>me</em>.

See full article...

 

[intelati]

Yesterday I had opened up Kagi again for a reevaluation and decided it wasn't worth my time to switch from the daily driver of DDG.

This article is ridiculous timing for a rereview...

the universe is giving me a sign??

 

[papadage]

I have been very frustrated with Google search lately and have been trying some of the workarounds you mention at the beginning of the article.

Thanks for a decent-looking alternative. I am not against paying for web search. The time I spend avoiding paid results and AI slop is worth more than that.

I'll take a look at it this week.

 

[coopster]

Very interesting write up, will have to give the free trial a spin.

 

[mangoslice]

I and others have been trumpeting Kagi in the comments for a while now and it’s great to see a more detailed article on it. I think I’ll be linking this article a lot in texts and conversations.

 

[squid_whisperer]

I'm using Kagi currently! I actually pay for the premium tier, which seems expensive, but basically comes with unlimited premium access to every relevant LLM currently on the market. For example, Claude 4 Opus with Reasoning. Great way to test all the current products, without having to for example, make an X Account

 

[wildsman]

Kagi is great and I use it but the problem for 99% of people is that Google is just good enough as a free product.

They think that ignoring a few ads/AI nonsense (Google AI summaries are awful) is worth it compared to shelling out for a paid product that is only marginally better all things considered.

I wish Kagi the very best but we probably need an ad supported free search alternative for mass adoption.

 

[clackerd]

sleeveless Patagonia vests

OK this stings for two reasons:
1) Patagonia is headquartered in my town and im irrationally defensive despite not owning any of their gear
2) vests inherently do not have sleeves and I don't play when it comes to redundancy

I'm intrigued about Kagi, and a free tier with 100 searches/mo seems like a pretty good way to get your feet wet. Not sure I use search enough to add another monthly fee to the mix, but the direction Google is headed with search, that could easily change.

 

[the.mighty.oracle]

I have been toying with kagi... google simply doesn't return me results anymore.

Anyone know anything about Librewolf browser?

 

[jitunicornfx]

Been on Kagi for a few months now and absolutely loving it! I find myself running searches with Google less and less. Most times when I re-run the search with Google instead of Kagi it doesn't improve the results. Probably only a handful of times has Google won out for me.

On the image search front I still find Bing to get me the best quality of results. Kagi is still catching up there. I do hope that one day Kagi Maps can take on Google but I suspect that will be a long time coming. Hopefully there will be an easy way to migrate all my pins over too.

 

[FragrantFlatulence]

Kagi Ultimate user since early 2024 and no regrets. I know not everyone likes AI, but I really like Kagi's approach to AI in search. It's there when you want it, and stays out of the way when you don't.

Their "Ki" (research assistant) is top notch. It gathers information from the web so much faster than I can by searching and reading through pages on my own. Plus if you want to deep dive, it gives you all the references of where it pulled info from.

 

[mangoslice]

Exchanging a search engine that can easily identify you, and even easily track you, because you're paying for it, it not an upgrade. Google is awful, but you could always browse in a private browser, or if you made an account, you could use false information. But Kagi, you've given them positive identification, to easily associate you with everything.

I am never going to pay to search the Internet. I already pay my ISP for that privilege.

I’d recommend reading into Kagi’s documentation and how they handle anonymized-but-authenticated queries. It’s pretty sweet.

Unless your ISP is also providing search indexing, I’d posit that effective internet search is not an inherent right to an internet citizen.

 

[squid_whisperer]

Exchanging a search engine that can easily identify you, and even easily track you, because you're paying for it, it not an upgrade. Google is awful, but you could always browse in a private browser, or if you made an account, you could use false information. But Kagi, you've given them positive identification, to easily associate you with everything.

I am never going to pay to search the Internet. I already pay my ISP for that privilege.

Definitely an interesting take. I have been enjoying the experience of improved search, but never really thought about it from a worsened privacy perspective.

 

[LordDaMan]

I have been toying with kagi... google simply doesn't return me results anymore.

Anyone know anything about Librewolf browser?

Firefox, only removing everything that says "firefox" in it and any telemetry it may give back to Mozilla. Also dumping google and bing search providers for qwent and SearX.

Pretty much what every other firefox fork does

 

[tgwozdz]

I'd probably already be a Kagi customer if it wasn't for their AI developments. If someone develops a Kg (that's Kagi with no AI) I'd be all over that.

 

[Painted]

Been paying for Kagi for about 18 months now, and I love it. It's like search is useful again, rather than just an excuse to shove ads at me. It's jarring when I have to use someone else's machine for searches and I end up on Google or Bing...

 

[Honeybog]

Every time I tell myself that $10/month isn’t that much and that I should just use Kagi, their subscription page reminds me that it comes with AI and I inevitably think “Well, $10 isn’t much, but couldn’t it be even cheaper without the AI bullshit?” and forget about it.

 

[pokrface]

Exchanging a search engine that can easily identify you, and even easily track you, because you're paying for it, it not an upgrade. Google is awful, but you could always browse in a private browser, or if you made an account, you could use false information. But Kagi, you've given them positive identification, to easily associate you with everything.

Maybe I'm misreading, but are you genuinely operating under the impression that Google is not tracking your searches and correlating them with you just because you're searching in a private window or using an account with false info?

To pierce that illusion in one of many, many possibly ways, do yourself a favor and look up how many times criminals are caught because a law enforcement agencies subpoena Google or another search engine for a suspect's search activity.

You need to do a hell of a lot more than that to obscure your identity to your search provider.

 

[Squuiid]

Meh. DuckDuckGo has served me well for the past 5 years or so. Already pay for enough subs as it is. Does look nice though.

 

[solomonrex]

I have branched out to Bing and DuckDuckGo, as someone who was a Chromebook early adopter and not particularly worried about privacy. Google is just so useless and eating it’s own tail when you see, for example, recipe searches all go to Google optimized sites that are built on a virtual assembly line by SEO seeking YouTubers and have unusable sites yet are indexed very highly.

Now add in AI and it’s become a self defeating ourobouros entirely driven by shareholders’ gullible belief that they can eradicate workers with AI, but not their livelihoods or comfort. Meanwhile AI polluting its own data feeds and can’t teach itself like any mammal, they have to start over at great expense every time with a new model.

The madness of crowds.

 

[MagicBoots]

There seems to be some confusion over privacy, if you're a paid member they have a privacy pass extension. This authenticates you as a paid member without IDing you when you use their search. So yes they know you have a paid Kagi account but are unable to tie your searches to it. If you are paranoid mix/match with a VPN so they don't even know where you are searching from.

 

[swr]

Everyone seems to know about duckduckgo, but startpage is rarely mentioned. It's basically duckduckgo but using google instead of bing. I think it has ads but I'm blocking those.

I thought briefly about switching Kagi but didn't like the idea of having to log in to prove I've paid, thus having search history tracked even more easily than Google does. The PrivacyPass thing looks like a good solution to that. I might have to reconsider.

 

[DarthSlack]

No to all.

Information wants to be free.

That's utterly hilarious that you think "information wants to be free" and Google are in any way compatible.

 

[Leiesoldat]

Hurray an article from Lee! Just what I asked for the last time Ken Fisher asked for our suggestions.

I've been using Kagi since late 2023. I haven't bothered to touch anything from Google, Bing, or DDG in that time period. I haven't looked at Maps yet, but the latest Google item I dumped was the translate feature.

 

[NameRedacted]

No to all.

Information wants to be free.

Which is exactly why Google makes it so damn hard to find any more.

 

[polycyclicAnthrocene]

I'll throw my anecdote on the pile. I finally made the switch to Kagi a couple months ago and have been happy with it. I get equivalent or better results than Google for technical material. It seems to have an issue indexing content farm sites and presenting those on the first page (see any recipe search) but I like that you can raise and lower ranking, and even block individual results. It's nice to provide negative ranking feedback for all the annoying LLM farms that litter the internet these days.

Edit: in fairness, alternatives like Google have a problem with presenting content farm slop on the first page of results too. At least Kagi gives you a vote on it.

 

[fenris_uy]

The average Google user searches three or four times per day or about 100 times per month. [1]

According to DuckDuckGo's data, their monthly average is about 30 searches per person, or one per day on average. [2]

What? I know that I'm not an average Google user, but I'm sure that even my 67 y/o mother does more than 4 searches per day.

 

[Happy Medium]

This sounds interesting. I friggin HATE the Google AI summaries, they actually take work to ignore, which is kind of insane if you think about it. I may give it a shot, I just hope that whoever is behind Kagi doesn't decide to enshittify and think "you know, even though they pay us, maybe we can make even more money by selling their information". Because just because you pay, doesn't mean you also aren't a valuable product. The fact that car manufacturers make you pay for their shitty connected services AND they sell your data to insurance companies makes that very very obvious.

 

[pauleyc]

Credit: Aurich "The King" Lawson

Indeed!

 

[petedog]

Have been using Kagi for nearly 2 years now, and would not go back to Bing or Google. I'll do pretty much anything I can to avoid ads/commercials, and Kagi accomplishes that AND good search results. I have found in my old age that sometimes it's just worth it to pay for a better experience.

 

[Robin-3]

No to all.

Information wants to be free.

[Citation needed]

Seriously, even public libraries require taxpayer funding.

Search engines require... salaries and servers and other things I don't understand, but I do understand the fact that operating costs exist. So that has to be covered, one way or another. Most "free" search engines out there do it by slurping up the disturbingly vast swathes of information they can get on you, and selling it to anyone who's interested. (Advertisers are probably the least concerning members of that group, which is saying something.)

 

[jg67379]

Im honestly sorry for the chronic skepticism, but I am always a bit suspicious when a news magazine/website reviews a specific paid services, claiming to be the best alternative without a complete review of the avaliable options.

Maybe this kagi is the solution, but DDG is not the only alternative. How does it compare with stuff like Qwant.com, startpage.com or others I don't know about yet?

My take on this is that it is more of an opinion piece than a review. But I would love to see a full review from Ars of alternative search engines!

 

[Honeybog]

Which is exactly why Google makes it so damn hard to find any more.

That’s just because Google made information so free that it made a break for it and went on the lam where Google Search can’t find it.

 

[the.mighty.oracle]

Firefox, only removing everything that says "firefox" in it and any telemetry it may give back to Mozilla. Also duping google and bing search providers for qwent and SearX.

Pretty much what every other firefox fork does

I'm more than a little disenfranchised with Firefox after they clearly caved to someone's influence/$ and removed the ReviewChecker feature. What would you consider the best browser?

 

[jg67379]

the thing that's stopping me from being completely effusive in my praise is that Kagi is exhibiting a disappointing amount of "keeping-up-with-the-Joneses" by rolling out a big 'ol pile of (optional, so far) AI-enabled search features.

Yeah to be fair that is also the case with DuckDuckGo. Even Firefox has their own built in LLM chatbot integration now.