I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).

All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.

I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now.

If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.

It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.

Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.

My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.

I have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower.

Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.

The customizability of Kagi is what really makes it shine.

You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever.

Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality.

The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.

The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats

Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.

It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)

I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.

I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).

What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.

Kagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.

Same here. It just stuck immediately and now I've been using it daily for over 4 years. Was on DDG before but prefixed almost everything with !g

I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.

Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.

I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.

Another huge Kagi fan here. So far the only search engine that doesn't feel like I'm loosing compared to Google.

Needing to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.

Does Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.

my prediction is that sooner or later kagi will be bought by google or microsoft

I tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge

I mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially.

I only use Google to search for reddit posts.

The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.

Is Kagi compromised? I am a duckduckgo user but always have to use yandex for political things ducduckgo, google etc will push down artificially low in the results due to their 'partnerships' with certain 'international advocacy organizations'.

I like the idea of Kagi but their shady corporate issues and continued funding of Russia is just a no go.