this post was submitted on 04 Nov 2025
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[–] frezik@lemmy.blahaj.zone 89 points 2 days ago (4 children)

Just had a conversation about this. I'll copypasta what I said there.

https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

tl;dr: they’re all in on AI (their own model, FastGPT, which is terrible), they make some very questionable business decisions with limited funds, and have a poor understanding of what Personally Identifiable Information (PII) actually is.

I could compromise on some of these things, but if I’m going to pay for their service as a Google alternative, I need to compromise less than I do with Google already.

[–] acosmichippo@lemmy.world 28 points 1 day ago

Also DDG is a perfectly viable option.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Appreciate you linking in your blog post. I've been on the fence about Kagi and you bring up a lot of good points informed by sources I'm unlikely to delve into.

[–] boonhet@sopuli.xyz 18 points 1 day ago (2 children)

To put you back on the fence, it had the best algorithm when I tested it some time ago. It showed me things I wanted by default. Google always needs some massaging and ddg needs a !g

[–] EvenOdds@lemmy.zip 9 points 1 day ago

Agreed. I pay for Kagi, and find their search better than any other, and struggle when I'm forced to use another search engine temporarily.

[–] SoleInvictus@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Dammit, my fence picket didn't even get cold!

[–] mmmac@lemmy.zip 15 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Yeah no im with the above user on this one. I have used kagi for over a year now and have never needed to use another search engine to find something

[–] LucidNightmare@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Same here.

Finding actual answers or at least able to point me in the right direction is way better than any of the other search engines I’ve tried.

DDG, Google, Bing, SearchNX, Ecosia, Brave, and probably some more, they just aren’t even in the same ball field for the things I look up personally.

[–] kazerniel@lemmy.world 2 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

I've been using Ecosia for a few months now and sadly I'm not having the best experience either. For mainstream stuff it gives good results, but once I search for obscure phrases or god forbid another language, it often just completely gives up and doesn't show a single result. It pains me to say that I more reliably get usable results from Google's Web search (so with the AI crap removed) than from Ecosia with Google set as its results provider.

[–] padge@lemmy.zip 4 points 17 hours ago

Thanks for sharing this, very informative read. I might have to go through that Cohost article when I have a spare hour haha

[–] isVeryLoud@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 hours ago

Thank you, very interesting post. I've interacted with Vlad before, he's very unhinged. I'm just using Kagi for a good time, not a long time.

I'm ready to jump off at the first whiff of them using my data for something funny, but I do really really like the idea of having a search engine that works this good and doesn't show me ads or sell my data, I'm allergic to both. Searxng results were complete garbage on all instances I've tried.