Meet Kagi, a Google search alternative worth paying for

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I’m not sure when it first occurred to me that there might be a better search engine out there—for me, at least—than Google.

I do know that over time, ads have come to commandeer far more of Google’s results, making it tougher to get to the organic links. For queries on how-to topics, many of the pages the algorithm finds feel like masterpieces of SEO optimization rather than authoritative advice. And though Google makes thousands of adjustments to its engine each year, I don’t always consider them to be improvements. (I’m still mourning its decision a while back to sometimes hide the news filter behind a menu item, so last week’s reports that news had temporarily disappeared altogether for some users sounded like a cruel prank.)

Even though it’s tough to shake the habit of reflexively Googling for information, my brain has been telling me I should explore other options. The one I’ve been trying lately is called Kagi. It’s been hovering on my radar screen for a while: Last December, we named it one of 2023’s best apps, and Daring Fireball’s John Gruber recently wrote that he likes it so much he goes weeks at a time without touching Google.

At first blush, Kagi looks so much like Google that you might forget it isn’t. The layout of its results pages is darn near identical, with familiar elements such as tabbed filters along the top and summaries drawn from Wikipedia and other sources on the right. There is one striking difference, though—Kagi is devoid of ads. Instead of monetizing its users by mining their data for targeted marketing, it carries a monthly fee with three pricing tiers. Most users surely gravitate to the $10-per-month Professional plan, which includes unlimited searches. (You do get 100 searches—lifetime, not per month—to whet your appetite before ponying up.)

Now, I should pause to acknowledge that any startup that chooses to compete with Google has taken on a challenge of mind-melting proportions even before you get to how conditioned we are to assume that search engines should be free. Back in 2021, I wrote about another pay-for-search startup, Neeva. It ended its quest less than two years later by selling itself to cloud analytics company Snowflake, which promptly shut it down.

Along the way, Neeva had raised $77.5 million from backers such as venture titans Greylock and Sequoia, reflecting an ultimately futile hope that it would become a big business. By contrast, Kagi sees its tininess as a competitive advantage. It has 25 employees and considered it a big deal when it raised a mere $670,000 last year, mostly from its own users. As I write, its 22,777 paying customers searched 442,961 times in the past day. If my math is right, Google handles that many queries every 4.5 seconds.

By leveraging APIs to get the data it needs from various sources, Kagi has created a shockingly credible alternative to Google on a shoestring. Actually, one of those sources is Google, whose web index it draws on along with information from Brave, Yandex, Wikipedia, Yelp, Tripadvisor, and others. It gets its maps from Apple and AI from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Mistral.

“It’s actually an advantage to grab stuff from all over,” CEO Vladimir Prelovac told me. “Because in that way, you ensure that if you cannot find something on Kagi, you cannot find it anywhere.”

I’m still figuring out whether I like Kagi’s results better than those I get from Google—which, admittedly, seem better after some recent algorithmic changes—but they’re certainly in the same ZIP code qualitywise. Moreover, Kagi shows much more obvious signs of considering search nerds (such as, well, me) a core constituency. That makes sense. Google is literally trying to please everyone on earth. Kagi has the luxury of serving only those who care enough about web searching to pay for it.

Rather than deciding which filters it should display for a given search, Kagi gives you consistent access to scads of them, including useful niches such as PDFs, podcasts, academic publications, and the “small web” (noncommercial sites). You can create your own “lenses”—custom search engines that give you control over which sites are and aren’t included, time ranges, and other factors—and then add them to a menu for later access. Its settings offer dozens of tweaks, such as the ability to eliminate videos, images, and other items from results.

Then there’s Kagi’s AI, which is similarly rich in functionality, though—like all AI built into search experiences—still raw and experimental. The ability to summarize web pages by prefacing the URL with “!sum” is genuinely helpful, and you can even segue into a chatbot conversation about them. If you end a search query with a question mark, Kagi provides an AI-generated “Quick Answer,” but I found the results erratic at best. (When I asked how old Tom Jones is, it gave me two answers—one right, one wrong—in the same reply.)

Subscribers to Kagi’s $25-per-month Ultimate tier can choose among six different large language models for its Assistant bot, including three from OpenAI, two from Anthropic, and one from Mistral. That may be more of a cool playground for fooling around with AI than an essential feature, especially since Mistral’s primary distinguishing feature at this point is its ability to come up with incredibly entertaining hallucinations. Even Kagi rates it poorly in the comparison chat it provides of all six LLMs.

Still, the very fact that Kagi lets you pick among multiple LLMs and is so open about their strengths and weaknesses sets it apart from more mass-market search engines. “AI is definitely here to stay, and it does change the paradigm of search,” Prelovac says. “But it’s not entirely clear how yet. I don’t think anyone’s got it right, including us.”

Kagi is also working under some constraints that Google—and even DuckDuckGo, the best-known search upstart—doesn’t face. For instance, there’s no way to set it as the default engine in Safari, the browser I use most; I’ve installed an extension that reroutes Google searches, a kludge at best. The company also offers Orion, an alternative web browser for Macs, iPhones, and iPads, with built-in Kagi searching, but it shouldn’t need to go that far to make itself readily available to its fans.

Overall, though, I’m impressed enough with Kagi to continue giving it $10 a month and see where it goes. I already happily pay the same amount for email, and web searches are at least as important to my personal and professional well-being. At the blazing pace I perform them, my Kagi searches will cost well under a penny apiece—not free, but close enough.

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