Internet search engines used to be purely about what’s best for you and me, and giving us what we’re looking for. Now, search engines don’t want to guide you to information on the internet. Instead, they want to be the “source” of that information, and that’s not an incentive for a good experience.
This is all driven by the hunger for revenue, but would you be willing to pay money to have a search engine that just gives you what you’re asking for, without the AI nonsense and privacy invasions? A service called Kagi promises exactly this, so I signed up for a free trial to see what it’s all about.
Kagi Is a Search Engine With a Subscription Fee
Let’s get the biggest question out of the way first—what will this cost us? There are three basic individual plans: Starter ($5/mo), Professional ($10/mo), and Ultimate($25) a month.
All of these options include Kagi’s AI feature, but only the Ultimate includes “premium models”. The cheapest option limits you to 100 searches per month. That’s certainly not enough for me, but according to Kagi most people average 100 searches a month, and so this should be good for most folks. There are also family and team plans, and it seems in all cases you can save a bit of money by paying an annual subscription instead of monthly—so far pretty par for the course.
If You Pay, Are You the Product?
Now, just like you, I’m already paying for way too many subscriptions as it is, and it’s especially galling when you start paying for a service that used to be both free and good. However, just like YouTube, only the free part is still true. This is why I started paying for YouTube Premium years ago and haven’t looked back. It’s a valuable service that I use every day for work and leisure. Removing the so-called “enshittification” from YouTube is well worth the money.
Now, I’m starting to feel the same way about Google Search itself, so what does Kagi promise to do if I fork over $5 or more? Well, first and definitely foremost is that you won’t see an advert of any kind. Second, you get control over the search results. So if you get a poor-quality website, you can flag it, and you won’t get it again.
Kagi makes use of AI, but unlike Google you get to choose how and when to use it. If a search result looks promising, you can click a button and Kagi’s Assistant AI will summarize it and pull key facts from it. An “AI Overview” isn’t shoved in your face without you asking for it.
According to the Kagi documentation, the search engine uses independent “non-commercial” indexes, and lets you personalize your searches without any of your data being sold to third parties. Of course, we can only take Kagi’s word for this just as with any service provider, but that’s what you get for your money. That puts it a step above privacy search engines like DuckDuckGo, which depends on Bing for some of its search indexing.
I Tried the Trial, and I Liked It
I signed up for the free trial, which gives you 100 searches for free and, honestly, this is what I remember Google search results looking like in the good old days.
No fluff, and as far as I can tell, the results are pretty decent and comparable with what I get putting the same terms into Google. It doesn’t do so well when I try to search for something like restaurants near me, but for factual searches it’s a frictionless experience. I haven’t used up all 100 searches yet, but I can already see myself using Kagi for facts, and using Google for more commercial purposes like shopping.
Search Doesn’t Have to Be a Free Service
I think we need to get out of the mindset that some internet services should be free. It may feel weird to pay for internet searches, but the internet isn’t what it was even five years ago. Search giants like Google, and maybe it’s the only one that’s really a giant, have smelled blood in the water, and they want all of that sweet revenue to stay in-house.
Using AI overviews, the engine takes content created by people like me, and serves it to people like you, while depriving creators of the revenue that would have been due to them if someone had visited the site. Meanwhile, you get a processed version of that content that might be completely wrong, even dangerously so.
To me, that means the value of the service has dropped so much that “free” is too high a price to pay.
Could This Be the Solution to the AI Search Apocalypse?
Services like Kagi and Perplexity are a good sign if you ask me, because it means there’s a gap in the market that AI-riddled, Ad-infested engines like Google aren’t serving. Ideally, the vast majority of people would opt for a deal where they pay a small amount of money for an internet search that tries to give them the best results without actively doing them harm—whether through privacy breaches or misinformation.
Free search engines would then become the internet equivalent of public restrooms. You use them because you have to, not because that’s your first choice. And that feels like an even more appropriate metaphor now, because Google’s search results page reminds me more of the scrawling on a bathroom wall than the clean and useful public service it used to be.