Does anyone have experience with the Kagi (paid subscription) search engine?
It is supposedly privacy respecting, ad free, and no sponsored results. It has its own crawler and might aggregate results from other search engines.
It also supports privacy pass to prove paid status while remaining anonymous. (How (well) does that work?)
Although the privacy angle is always a large dose of ātrust usā when it comes to online servicesā¦ my experience over the past 2 years have been nothing less than awesome with this search engine.
I have control over removing sites entirely from results eg pinterest or instagram.
Clean AI-free image seach.
AI proxy to all the popular ones via their Assistant.
A summarizer and page translator.
Good results that are on topic and with much less SEO or AI slop than DDG or Google.
I get to choose when I want an AI generated answer vs a search, simply by appending a question mark to my query.
Iām probably not even using everything they have to offer but they have brought sanity to my online searches.
Thanks!
Are you using āprivacy passā with it?
Which browser(s) do you use with it?
Didnāt know about this paid service. Sounds really interesting and ethical too.
Which plan did you choose? Are you satisfied with their [standard] AI proxy?
Iām not using privacy pass, no. Every one of my in use browsers have switched to Kagi:
I also sometimes dabble with their own browser, Orion, but end up with Firefox always.
Apparently they have a new browser coming: Linux port of Kagiās privacy-focused Orion web browser
Kagi reveals Orion (Milestone 2) has performance parity with other WebKitGTK Linux browsers, like GNOME Web, scoring similar on Speedometer 3.0.
If reading this has you itching to try it out, youāll have to wait. No public builds of Orionās Linux port are available for testing, and when available, the plan is to only give paid Orion+ and Kagi subscribers first dibs.
You can learn more about Orion (for macOS) by visiting the Orion landing page or reading through the lengthy FAQ. Kagi has started to open-source pieces used in Orion, too.
(from Orion Browser for Linux Gets Exciting Progress Update - OMG! Ubuntu)
From their site:
Zero telemetry by default
Blocking 1st party ads by default
Blocking 1st party trackers by default
Blocking 3rd party ads by default
Blocking 3rd party trackers by default
(Iād still want to see it in https://privacytests.org/)
Same here, Iāve been using them for the last 2 years. Search results are always spot on, better than I get from any other search engine. You can block sites you donāt want to see. You can rank sites you like higher (even pin them). Their AI assistant proxies prompts to LLM providers so that should give a little bit of privacy.
Theyāre subscriber-driven (no venture capital) and structured as a Social Purpose Corporation (like Purism I think?) so that they can prioritize not only profit.
Their CEO, Vladimir Prelovac, was on the Intelligent Machines (TWiT) podcast a few weeks ago where they go into many of their features.
Havenāt tried Privacy Pass yet, because that works either in their add-on or their Orion browser (neither of which I use).
4 posts were split to a new topic: Other decent search engine suggestions
Iāll also use this space to advertise for Kagi. Theyāre doing pretty great in every way, paying subscriber model without ads is the way to go and I think we should all support them like we do for Purism just to at least try to break the terrible monopoly that we currently have now. Itād be amazing if they could grow to a reasonable size and keep the same attitude.
That would be amazing and one can hope.
The main reason that I asked about Privacy Pass in conjunction with Kagi is that is the only place using it that I am aware of. I donāt particularly feel the need to use Privacy Pass with Kagi, but Privacy Pass strikes me as something that would be wonderful for paid periodical subscriptions and paid streaming services. For those that donāt know, the Privacy Pass protocol is completely independent of Kagi.
I would prefer that this topic be kept to direct experience with kagi and any mention of other search engines be direct experience with them compared to direct experience with kagi.
I think that there are already topics of what is best search engine and generic comparisons of search engines. If they are all stale, then a new topic should be created.
Thanks.
I recently signed up for Kagi, and switched to using their Orion browser around the same time. Iām a business owner, family man, involved with running a church, and all around tech guy into *nix and Mac particularly.
Iāve eschewed Google almost completely for several years now, my previous search engine of choice was DuckDuckGo, and Iāve trialled quite a few others - Kagi beats them all hands-down for most tasks, generally speaking. There are specific cases where the cold hard results (if you can find them amidst the ads) are better or worse with one search engine or another, e.g. Google does locale-based searches better than any other engine Iāve used, and DuckDuckGo keeps the āadultā corner of the web at armās length a little better than most. Kagi is breath of fresh air though, and one Iām not likely to leave, ever. Straight, clean, clear and honest results, from a company that isnāt actively trying to monetise my attention, or that of my children, etc. etc.
In a world where you vote with your attention, Kagi has mine. 