I’ve seen that name pop up a few times. I should give their 100 free searches a try. The 1.5 cent / search fee seems reasonable enough.

That being said, I find it a bit of a stretch the way they try to reason their value add.

. . . Google generating USD $11 revenue per user per month. However the value you receive is well below USD $11 because your results are influenced by ads. Choosing to subscribe to Kagi means that while you are now paying for search you are getting a fair value for your money . . .

source

Kagi. This is the name I haven't heard for long time...

So, what's the story?

Kagi boasts about not spending money on marketing and I think that's a little bit of PR bs, a little strategic, and a little because they probably don't have a ton of money for it.

Strategically, it let's them grow more organically, through word of mouth, and probably in a more long-term sustainable way.

I just started paying for it and I am so amazed at the quality of search results. I haven't done a ton of A/B testing versus Google or bing but I've noticed that it's a cleaner interace and I get to results way faster. I'm genuinely shocked too, because ecosia or duckduckgo always had me going back to Google to actually get the answer I needed 50%+ of the time. Those other searches just had shitty results. Kagi hasnt let me down at all. The results are either on par or vastly superior to Google.

I will say that I more apt to check more results before I refine the search terms because they technically "cost". Which is hilarious because I do the 300 search tier and I doubt I'd hit it. And if I did it's literally a penny for additional searches. Just thought that was an interesting observation I made about my search habits.

Ecosia is similar to DDG but maybe better. Personally for me, I like that Ecosia gives you the option of Bing or Google for maps, while DDG just dumps you into Apple Maps. Ecosia uses the same tags, eg !g for google, but they also do stuff with trees or whatever.

Ecosia's search itself is through Bing, just like DDG.

I crunched the numbers in another comment.

• Supposedly $5 for 300 searches a month is enough for most people - they claim on average people use Google 3-4 times per day, or 90-120 times per month. However, when you phrase that as 10 searches per day you can easily imagine that you might go over your 300 per month every now and then.
• Additional searches are 1.5c each, or $4.50 for 300 searches.
• $10 gets you 1,000 searches per month. 1c per search if you use them all.
• $25 per month is unlimited, but you get 15% discount if you pay a year up front - $255.
• You would need to make 1,833 searches a day with the $10 per month plan for the $255 annual plan to be worth considering.

I agree that it's too expensive. The fact that their individual search rate is cheaper than the lowest tier monthly search annoys me. Then, the only way to get less than 1c per search is to make more than 21,000 searches a year on the most expensive plan.

If I could share my account across a family or a small business, that might make sense, but otherwise it's asking a lot for only a small improvement over the competition.

There are blog posts but basically these guys don't have investor funding, need to cover costs, and the cost structure is representative of their costs.

Running a search index is expensive, it's honesty pretty amazing a company of this size can manage it.

Honestly, I've been using it as my default research engine for a year and... I'm now manualy changing to Google everytime I'm REALLY searching for something.

Qwant results are generaly several steps below.

Can you recommend a Bing based search engine that works comparably? I've used DDG and it's ok, not great. (I compare most search engines to Google of 10 years ago, which was wonderful.)

holy crap. I can't believe they beat out duck duck go or even brave or ecosia.

honestly I thought they were subsumed by aol.