It took me half a lifetime. Admittedly, there were also the corresponding offers for it.
For about 2.5 years, I have been a paying customer of kagi.com, a search engine that provides me with good services in my daily navigation through this internet.
I still remember well that I initially doubted myself. Paying for something that I can get for free from Google. And it was exactly this doubt that made me a paying customer. Finally, I could give money to a provider so that I could use a product without having to be the product myself. No advertising. No profiling. No "don't be evil," but a business model. Like Netflix. And priced similarly.
Initially, the number of included searches in the monthly flat rate was limited. I always worried a bit that my quota wouldn't last until the end of the month, and I would have to switch to a higher payment plan. That has never happened to me. I settle at about 450 search operations per month. Initially, it was 500 per month. That was changed to unlimited searches in the meantime.
In addition to a friendly team and transparent communication, I appreciate the development of the features. What initially excited me was that I could prioritize sources in search results (Instagram = blocked), and a summarizer function and a translator have since been added.
We regularly use the summarizer to create summaries of our LLM-generated podcasts. The translator has been integrated into our website and takes care of translations as the successor to DeepL.
It's also very nice that integration as a preferred search engine in my browser works, and when I perform a search with a question mark at the end, I immediately get a fully formulated answer above the search results from Kagi.
With this, Kagi connects to the newer AI-based searches from Perplexity and OpenAI.
Give Kagi a chance and pay for a product so that you are not the product.
