Here we are again, 30 140 Days later!#

Whoops…

Work took priority over this blog, so I never got around to updating my Kagi review. This extra time turned out to be useful.

To put it shortly: I have switched completely to Kagi.

It is now the search engine I use exclusively. However, I do not think this is the correct choice for everyone.

Google was the final nail to make me choose Kagi#

This happened after my initial Kagi experience concluded. I had let my subscription lapse, choosing not to renew it. Kagi has some significant trade-offs which were enough of an issue for my productivity. My 180-degree turn came at the end of January, when I was looking for a command I frequently need at work to delete the Windows Hello Container when it becomes bugged.

Google decided to present me with a captcha. I had already grown tired of these in the past month. On my iPhone, I use iCloud Private Relay and on my corporate laptop a VPN client. Due to the number of clients active through each public-facing IP assigned to me through these services, I had to go through the famous Google reCAPTCHA, making me second guess whether a tile including three pixels of a wheel belongs to a motorcycle or not.

On VPNs, Google makes you go through the captcha multiple times, presumably to discourage their use. They start with the default kind, selecting boxes with “object x” and pressing continue. You might get multiple of these before Google refreshes the page to give you the next type: each tile shows a different image, with new ones appearing if you tap one. You click all images containing a subject and tiles refresh to show new images that have to be checked again. This wouldn’t be as big an issue if images loaded quickly, but Google makes you wait up to 5 seconds for each one. This isn’t due to slow internet: it seems deliberate, as the same captcha loads faster if you’re signed into a Google account.

And that’s the next issue: if you’re logged into Google, you probably won’t face these problems as often, even on a VPN. But I don’t want to log into Google at work, or at least not in my work browser. The images don’t even pose a real stopping force to bots. Image recognition paired with LLMs can already beat reCAPTCHA challenges rather easily, even if computationally expensive. Effectively, this just makes frequent searchers grind their teeth down.

The bad (that bothered me while using Kagi)#

Their AI tools bother me, especially their move into GenAI for image generation. Now, this might partially be as someone who knows quite a few of artists and who also has friends who are artists, but I cannot morally support Image Generation AI trained on artistic content without permission or compensation to the artists in question. This also applies to text AI, but the maliciousness of it is especially visible to me when related to image generation.

Another thing I miss, surprisingly, is a search history. It is kinda hard to find out what you were searching exactly when you came across an interesting article, especially if you were on another device, and when you can no longer find the article you were looking for.

A minor annoyance was currency conversion, as on kagi it is handled by Wolfram Alpha, which doesn’t exactly update it’s data on currency conversion as frequently as let’s say Google. If you for one reason or another have to convert currencies, look up currency trends or you have to look up stocks enough times for it to matter but not enough to have a widget on your phone for it, then you probably won’t use kagi or wolfram alpha to look this up. However, kagi thankfully has a built-in workaround in the form of bangs!

The last, and probably smallest annoyance is that, in Safari, you cannot actually set the search engine to be kagi. Apple only allows for a couple of pre-determined search engines (I’m gonna guess for security reasons, but come on), which isn’t kagi’s fault, but certainly makes it harder to adopt for someone switching to it.

Of course, there is the cost, but I’m not gonna complain about that as I am sure everyone looking up kagi hears of the cost when they first hear of it.

The good stuff#

One of the biggiest upsides for me is being able to block certain websites from my results entirely. Fandom wikis are a prime example, as they are riddled with ads and often crowd out better, community-run wikis in search results for open-source projects. Being able to down-rank or filter out AI-generated content is similarly valuable, as more and more of the web is being flooded with low-quality AI content that pollutes search results.

Of course, there are no ads on kagi, but I’d also expect that for any service I am subscribed to. Looking at you, Amazon Prime.

Then there also is the customization options that kagi offers, including CSS customization, just to let you tweak your search experience a lot more and make it fit more personal preferences, even when an option isn’t supplied by kagi themselves.

The lack of captas, of course is another advantage, and last but not least: Another thing I appreciate is that you only get AI answers when you add a “?” to your search. This keeps them optional rather than shoving them in your face every time, like how google does it. All around, you just get way more control over your search experience.

Is switching search engines worth it?#

It is kind of a bother having to switch search engines on every device. Every time I get a new device or browser, I need to set up the Kagi search extension for it to also work in private mode. But ultimately, I am sure that this time has been enough to convince me of its worth.

Three months in, I’ve grown to appreciate Kagi’s features more than during my initial trial. Customizing my search experience has become more valuable than I anticipated. Blocking low-quality websites from my results is something I didn’t know I needed until I had it.

For things Google still does better, like currency conversion, I use bangs. Typing !g before a query redirects me to Google. So !g 50 USD to EUR takes me straight to Google’s conversion widget. This doesn’t work as smoothly on iPhone within the Kagi web page, but it covers most edge cases.

The lack of native Safari support remains a minor annoyance. On both Mac and iPhone, I use the Kagi extension, which works well enough. It’s a compromise I’m willing to make.

For me, kagi is still the best option out there, compared to something like DuckDuckGo, Ecosia or Microsoft Bing.

Final thoughts#

I’m paying for something I used to get for free, and I’m okay with that. The subscription costs less than I spend on coffe in a week, and the cleaner search experience is worth it to me.

If you’re curious about alternatives, there’s no harm in trying them out. You can always switch back if you find you liked what you had before more. Sometimes you don’t know what you’re missing until you try something different. Just cuz Google might’ve been the default for your entire life, like how it was for me, doesn’t mean that there isn’t better.

Three months in, I can confidently say I made the right choice for my needs. Your mileage may vary, and that’s perfectly fine.

If you made it all the way down here, thank you for reading! I hope you enjoyed the article.

Legal Notice: I am not sponsored by any entity mentioned in this article and do not earn any money through affiliate commissions or similar measures. I will link to Wikipedia in most places to link to a more neutral source of information, than the company creating a product in question.

This is a personal experience report with no commercial partnership with Kagi.
All information is provided without warranty.
No liability is assumed for linked external content.