Kagi: The thinking man's search engine

A while back I made a post on Reddit that was a hybrid question/rant about the current state of affairs with online search engines. I remember a time not long ago when one could find the answer to seemingly any question they wanted in 30 seconds on Google. A simple query, "How to make Chicken parmesan", would very quickly fill your screen with a list of relevant articles, blog posts, videos, etc. Unfortunately, this does not seem to be the case anymore. Google, and the other two mainstream search engines, Yahoo and Bing, now very clearly prefer to peddle products and millions of rambling AI-generated listicles over actual information. Advertised results from Amazon that paid to be at the top, and just under that "Top 10 best X of [current year]", which is exactly the same list as "Top ten best X of [previous year]". It's a mess. Time was, you could very easily find links to obscure, but helpful, random forums and information written by real people. Not anymore. Everything is now buried under page after page of targeted results, which are usually poorly targeted, results from your local community that you don't care about, and again, I cannot stress this enough, clickbaity listicles where the content is usually broken up into slides to serve yet more ads.

Anyway, one of the more helpful suggestions that I got reccomended to me as a result of that Reddit post was Kagi. A premium, paid-product search engine. I was a little skeptical at first, what could possibly be so good about this that it was worth paying for?

Well, spoiler alert, it's worth every penny. Needless to say, this is not a sponsored post. I wish I was cool enough to get sponsorships. What I am, is, one year later, still a happy paying customer of Kagi. It is the very first thing I log into on all my devices, and the only thing I consider it worth making a cookie-storing exception for to stay logged into. What follows is a brief summary of the main reasons that I love this product so much. I write this for two reasons, one, because I really like the product and more people should know about it. And two, because I want to illustrate the point that I am all too happy to pay for services that I find value in. Not everything needs to be free as in beer. So yes, I actually pay for my search engine. I also pay for email, but that's a story for another article.

1 - Kagi prioritises quality over quantity

With Google/Yahoo/Bing you get hundreds of thousands of results and most of them are junk. With Kagi, I get just over a hundred at most, sometimes only a dozen, but virtually all of them are extremely relevant. This is a great thing. The point of a search engine is to sift through the web so you don't have to, I'd rather have just a few results that actually represent what I am looking for than a bunch of noise.

2 - Kagi organises the results much more neatly

No junky listicles cluttering up the page. Kagi helpfully sorts your results into categories and sub-lists, such as "Quick Peek" (a brief Q/A style of dropdowns), "Interesting Finds", (tangentially related, but interesting), and of course "Listicles" (often grouping virtually all of this nonsense into this one little sub-list, significantly reducing clutter among the main results). This is coupled with other features you'd expect, a brief Wikipedia on the side if one is determined to be relevant to your query, a preview of images and videos also dug up, etc. I find I can quickly get my eyes to useful information so much faster than was possible for me on other search engines.

3 - Kagi doesn't sort results based on paid deals

At least, not to my knowledge or from anything I've observed. The big names, Amazon, Facebook, Walmart, etc., don't seem to get any preferential treatment other than what they have managed to pull off internally with their own SEO. No more scrolling through an entire page of Amazon links to find actual information. I routinely find results from all across the web, including foreign sites and random little domains I'd otherwise never have heard of or visited. Kagi makes a geniune effort to put the most useful information as close to the top as possible.

4 - FastGPT

This is a fantastic use for AI, and in my opinion should be featured more prominently on their home page. FastGPT can take a simple naturally written question, and give a simple natrually written answer. "How's the weather in Seattle?" gives me: "The weather in Seattle today is expected to be mostly cloudy with a high of 65°F and a low of 48°F. There is a 24% chance of precipitation.[1] The forecast for the next few days shows a mix of partly cloudy and cloudy skies, with temperatures ranging from the mid-40s to the mid-60s. There is a chance of rain on some days." This is of course coupled with the face that even on manual searches Kagi is much, much more respectful of naturally-formed queries. On other search engines I find I routinely have to practice Google-fu, modifying the query, adding exceptions, quotation marks, and other declarations to alter the search to get meaningful results. Not so in Kagi. It can take a simple "How to assemble X" or "What does Y do" and get me useful results.

5 - It doesn't bury the weird stuff

Kind of like point #2, but I want to again emphasize that Kagi doesn't care where the data came from, only how useful it is for the query. It has no problem pointing me toward forum posts from 2005, or an a research paper from 1982, or an archive.org upload of a user manual from 1943. It doesn't care about what is considered trendy or hot, it only cares about giving relevant data.

6 - Summarize any result's page at the click of a button

Self explanatory and wildly effecient. Just hovering over a link and clicking the button will condense it down into its key points, as if you fed the document directly into GPT.

7 - Adjust search results based on preferences

I personally don't really use this feature, simply because I don't need to. The default results are almost always good enough to get what I need quickly. But if it didn't, you can always push certain websites higher in your preferences. I imagine doing this for large usercount sites like Reddit and StackExchange would be extremely beneficial for general queries.

8 - Lenses

Brave has this function too, but for those unfamiliar this basically narrows your results down to specific types. Let's say you only want acedemic sources, PDFs, forums, etc. You can easily toggle these on and off to further filter results. They also support adding your own custom ones, but again, I find personally I never need that. The defaults are usually just that good on their own.

All of these combined mean that I can get way more meaningful information out of the web at a much quicker rate than I could using other search engines. It nests perfectly with my ADHD workflow and when I fire up a browser tab and toss a search query in a new device or VM for the first time, and get redirected to Google, I instantly can tell the difference and instantly remember I need to log into Kagi.

It might be hard for many people to see the value in it. A search engine is typically not something you imagine paying your hard-earned cash for, it's something we all just kind of assume is a given part of the web. Always remember: If the product is free (as in beer), then you are the product. When you consider how frequently you use a basic search engine, especially if you are a techy, do it yourselfer, or just spend way too much time online, $10 a month (at the time of writing) isn't a bad deal by any means for such a high-quality tool.

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