What I Like About Kagi

07 The Cauldron
I have been getting pretty tired of Google, particularly it no longer cares about providing human or accurate results as much as it's interested in shoving ads and tracking in your face. Google something nowadays and all you'll get is SEO jumbled garbage that does nothing but waste your time.

I've never really thought of trying out an alternative because I am a complacent idiot. Recently though, I saw a recommendation for the search app Kagi, and I'm already enjoying it enough to pay for it.

The search experience on Kagi is super clean and streamlined, and I haven't had any problems getting accurate or relevant searches, even for more obscure requests. It has context sensitive stuff, like a news section, but there are no ads or trackers. I've been satisfied with the results given back to me most of the time. But if I see a site I hate or don't want in my results, I can easily just reduce its ranking in my searches or block it wholesale, which I love.

You can also customize the interface as much as you want. Oh, and in particular I love that it just groups together annoying listicles. Ever try to search for a good laptop? This is what that looks like on Kagi:

One of the worst parts of searching on Google has been images. You can barely customize those searches anymore, and I straight up can't copy or download images from a website on my phone. Kagi's image search is much closer to the old days of Google. In particular it puts the ratio search options right on the main page, thank God. There's a bunch of other helpful options too, like image type, recency, etc. It's really good.

One feature I want to spend more time with is the Lenses aspect. Basically you can craft a specific set of criteria and then apply them to a search. For example, a quick one I made was a "Reddit" lens that lets me generate search results only from Reddit, which is always great for human troubleshooting. You could also make a search that only pulls from .edu domains, or are specifically links to PDFs. It's honestly super cool!

The last thing I like is that it includes bangs right out of the box, same as DuckDuckGo. "!yt Silent Hope Opening" and it'll take you straight to that search on YouTube.

So yeah, I'm really really enjoying my experience with Kagi. It took less than 5 minutes to make it my default search engine on my computer and phone, and I'm more than happy to pay for anything that gets me away from Google more and more. The starter plan gives you 300 searchers per month for $5 - but I pay $10 for Unlimited because I have ADHD so uh, I search a lot, lmao. Check it out if you're interested.