This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).

Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.

Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:

  • Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
  • “Lenses”, which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
  • All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type “!yt” in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
  • Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more

This blog post goes into full details about Kagi’s capabilities.

    • sloppy_diffuser@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      71·
      1 year ago

      The results aren’t always perfect, but its more of fighting with SEO.

      With DDG I’d often have to switch back to Google for a query. Now when switching from Kagi to Google when I can’t find a result the results are usually worse. For a niche topic I’m vaguely familiar with I’ll usually do ChatGPT so I can get the proper search terms and then find what I want on Kagi.

      It tends to improve the more you adjust your personalized weights. I was pretty lazy with that the first month and found it slightly subpar compared with Google. Now it seems way better.

      Lots of UI customizations if you don’t like a particular feature. As an example I don’t like their Listicles feature (groups top X type of results). Mostly because that content is poor quality. Disabling the feature just removes those crap results that would go in the widget which is a bonus for me.

      The ability to switch lenses (topic contexts) that you can customize those result weights for instead of one global context Google assigns you.

      I wish they had a better solution for anonymous searching. There is a pay as you go API I could use with a second account funded from cleaned bitcoin. Would be great if I could use the website though from a pay as you go funded source.