About three months ago I ditched Google as my primary search engine and started using Kagi instead – and haven’t looked back.

Kagi is a subscription based service: you get to test it for free for one hundred searches, and if you are satisfied, you can start with the 5 USD/month (+tax) plan that includes 300 searches. I’ve found that with my usage I can usually manage about 27 days, after which I can just renew the monthly subscription a bit early with a couple of clicks.

Why pay for your search engine, then, when Google is free? Well, the old saying goes that if you’re not paying for the product, then you are the product. In practice this means that you will be shown lots of ads and “sponsored links” – which are just ads by another name. It seems that companies often buy ads that target their competitors too, so if you’re looking for info about product X of company Y, then the first “search results” you get are actually about the competing product Z by company W. All this gets quite tiring in the long run. I also noticed that not only because of this but because of ChatGPT my Google searches had dropped dramatically. Google just didn’t have any pull anymore.

What’s Kagi doing better, then? For one, they don’t have ads, so they are not incentivized to serve any advertisers but you, the user. For a user there are some neat features, such as increasing or decreasing the priority of any sites in your search results, something that I have indeed missed in Google. Kagi also has a delightful Small Web initiative highlighting little personal sites that you couldn’t find with Google even by accident. Kagi also has an actual changelog – when have you ever seen a search engine, or any major web site for that, display one proudly? These little details make Kagi feel like it’s made by humans for humans. Kagi’s origin story is also worth reading.

I’d say there’s a growing sense that people are tired of being the product and of the general enshittification of the web. People want control over their own their data, they don’t want Meta, Google, or that dumpster fire X deciding what they may access and see. You constantly get to read about people and businesses that are locked out of their Instagram accounts for no apparent reason and there’s nothing they can do to appeal because it’s all handled by some faceless algorithms. That’s a contributing factor also to why I’m using the Micro.blog platform for hosting this blog and why I’m using Kagi: I want to support the smaller players that are still trying to Do The Right Thing.