Kagi Search

“Look, I know it feels wild to pay for a search engine, but it also feels wild to actually find out you absolutely love to search for things when you don’t see nonsense all the time. This is one of the last things to cancel on my subscription list, and it earned that respect.”

“Google used to be good. Kagi is better. Some scoff at the thought of paying for a search engine. But for users who value deep dives through the internet and don't want their experience cluttered with ads and AI slop, giving up $10/month is well worth it. A longtime favorite feature is domain filtering, which allows you to rank up, down, or outright block domains from your results. Pinterest (infamous for useless landing pages), TikTok, and Facebook are among the most blocked by Kagi's users, among some other usual suspects: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=insights Kagi also runs projects like Small Web, a Stumbleupon-style index of small websites with Web 2.0 vibes. (I hope to build my own site back like these!) Their search product also has a user-report-driven anti-AI system to help flag Ai-generated webpages in results, though that initiative has seen mixed results.”

“I recently started using this and oh my god it is like what Google used to be before turning into an AI slop extrusion machine. By which I mean: you find actual people and websites they made.”

“Kagi eliminated the visual fatigue/cognitive fatigue that used to bombard me whenever I used other search engines. I love how customizable it is in terms of themes, tailoring search preferences (no AI summaries!), prioritizing favorite websites in search results, and just making it less stressful to browse the web. Subscriptions start at $5 a month and there is a 100-search free trial. I have never been more excited about a service. PS: You can change the dog icon to a cat or a capybara too!”

“Google search has been going steadily downhill for at least a decade, and it's been a long time since they've had any meaningful motivation to actually make it good—their goals at this point are to maximize ad impressions, push their AI stuff, keep people on their site as much as possible, and track everything they do there. Kagi is a terrific alternative. It's a paid service, and it seems weird at first to pay for search when there are various free options even aside from Google, but that's really the only way to get a search engine that is actually incentivized to deliver the best results they can in a clean way with zero ads. It's very customizable (e.g., they'll provide AI answers if you want, or you can turn that off, which I did immediately), and they have extensions to make it work invisibly as a default search engine on iPhones and Android even though it's not built into the OS settings. I signed up about a year ago just on a monthly plan to give it a shot, switched to annual shortly thereafter, and haven't looked back.”