KagiReviews of kagi.com

The search itself is good. But the company are using the questionable method of making it very easy to sign up, or upgrade your plan. But it is totally impossible to cancel the subscription or removing your payment-method. An honest company make me stay by delivering a good product. Dishonest companies makes it impossible to cancel and then it is just a mater of time before they quietly change their terms and charge their customer a fortune.

It is nice to have search results without unwanted adds and paid results. BUT $ 50.- for one year and a limited searching is insane! You just have about 3'400 attemps per year.

Just putting in a bunch of keywords works about as well--perhaps slightly better--than the same thing on DuckDuckGo. For the amount of searching I do, I'd currently have to pay $10/month to use Kagi as my main search engine. For that price, and with how certain features are touted, I was looking for a way to filter and tailor searches better. Tried using their documented operators (and/or, grouping by parentheses, minus sign to exclude, limiting search to titles, etc.) Couldn't get results that made sense, and often queries returned nothing. Emailed support to ask about the precedence of these operators. For example, does one write -intitle:foo or intitle:-foo to exclude the word foo from the title? Will -(bar AND bat) exclude pages with both bar and bat as keywords? Got a generic response saying that search operators are documented on a "best effort" basis since not all their upstream providers support them or document them. Objected that they still have to parse them in order to translate them for upstream APIs, apply them to their own indices, etc. Then a developer emailed me with some almost useful information saying that their parsing is really pretty "flat," and he gave some examples. Objected that even so, there has to be precedence. For example, do they see the minus sign as applying to an operator like "inititle" or as applying to a keyword like "foo"? And with expression grouping using parentheses, recursive parsing is required. At that point the customer-service person seemed to accuse me of wanting to steal their IP. He said they couldn't reveal any more details about how their search works. I objected that in order to know how to make a nontrivial query, the operators would have to be documented in terms of precedence (or at least a lot of rich examples given). He looped back to the same boilerplate message about operators being documented as a "best effort." For a search engine claiming to be premium and setting itself up as an alternative to the big corporate bureaucracy, this came across like the corporate runaround. I was also told that if I wanted to, I could post questions to their user community (presumably on Discord, which would require me to set up a Discord account). But Kagi isn't positioning itself as a grassroots crowdsourced search engine. They want half the price of a premium subscription to ChatGPT. For that price, their system should have working operators that are documented.

Using this search engine is a lot less frustrating than other options: it tends to search for what you type. However, their claim to be ad free and humane is a lie. They prioritize search quality over criticism of some of their spending funding humanitarian crises and serve advertisements as "specials" but claim that their refusal to take payment for ad placement means those ads are not ads. Overall, they're actively working to make search a lot better, for now. And even thought their service tends to be quite buggy, they're also very active in finding and fixing these bugs and lacking features

The free/tiered plan with limited searches (e.g. 300 searches a month for a paid plan, or trial amounts) can be restrictive, especially for heavier or more frequent search users. If you use search many times a day, these limits add up