Pay for your search results!
Table of Contents
I know paying for things that are supposed to be free is a very controversial topic. But we shouldn’t forget: “If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.”
Why bother with all this?
Ultimately, this is about the privacy of every single user and creating independence on the internet. For anyone who wants to delve deeper into the topic, I highly recommend Techlore.
What are my alternatives?
Free search engines
On one hand, we have the well-known services like DuckDuckGo, and more recently, Brave Search and Mullvad Leta.
They’re free and they provide search results. I’ve tried switching to these search engines time and time again, but unfortunately, the results are barely usable for me. Of all of them, DuckDuckGo was decent, but even with it, I often had to go back to Google. And we all know how drastically Google’s results have deteriorated over the years.
Meta search engines
To put it simply, these are search engines that forward a user’s search query, collect the results, and then display them. The search itself is done without any user data.
Here you have projects like SearXNG and Whoogle. They work, but I often got very strange or even worse search results than with Google. So I went back to Google again.
The solution? Kagi!
I discovered Kagi and was immediately intrigued by their concept. A short while later, I was in love.
Kagi itself has become much more than just a paid service for a simple search. It’s more like a collection of different services.
Kagi’s approach to search engines
Kagi doesn’t collect user data. Results are not personalized. They have their own ways of indexing pages (I have no idea how they do it, but it works really well). They use artificial intelligence to summarize search results when needed, but also to match the relevance of the content to the search query.
A really good translator with proofreading
Similar to my otherwise all-time favorite translator, DeepL, they offer very similar functions. The translations are usable. It also suggests corrections directly during the translation and explains why the translation turned out that way. You can accept the correction if you want, but you don’t have to.
If you do want the text correction, it’s available separately in another tab. The corrections are significantly better than when I send my texts to LLMs and bluntly say, “Here, correct this text for me.”
Interface for various LLMs
Kagi also offers chat interfaces to interact with a wide variety of LLMs. One reason I loved using Perplexity was that you aren’t limited to just one AI, like with ChatGPT or Claude. They aren’t the most powerful LLMs in the cheaper plans, but they’re serviceable. And since the release of DeepSeek, “open source” LLMs have become a genuinely viable alternative, so I’m happy to use them. Currently, I really enjoy using Qwen3.
What is this all costing me right now?
€10 a month.
Conclusion
For me, Kagi brings together the following:
- A fresh and interesting approach to finding relevant content THAT ISN’T FROM GOOGLE!
- Finally, access to a good translator/proofreader that can compete with DeepL and is affordable.
- Access to LLMs that are more than sufficient for everyday use, which even led me to immediately cancel my, in my opinion, really expensive Perplexity subscription, and before that, ChatGPT.
There was apparently some criticism that Kagi “tracks” users when Google doesn’t. Here’s my take on that. The service doesn’t have a single tracker on its site that my uBlock Origin would otherwise flag, in contrast to DuckDuckGo. I usually only experience something like that in the Indieweb, lmao. The way Kagi presents itself feels very modern, without letting core aspects like data protection and privacy fall by the wayside.
I can also well imagine that many people—myself included—find it super annoying when companies feel the need to cram artificial intelligence into everything. But Kagi is truly one of the few providers that has implemented it very well so far. Also, AI doesn’t necessarily have to be a negative thing. As mentioned before, I’ve been using DeepL since 2018. It’s a fantastic service, and they were already “advertising” with AI long before LLMs were even a topic of conversation. Furthermore, they offer a very good all-rounder for all the services that are important to me outside of coding.
I currently have the €10 subscription and, as I mentioned, was able to cancel my Perplexity subscription. I’m more than satisfied so far and am really excited to see what else they’ll release in the future.