Technology

It shows up for me in the UI. I imagine that it works, and if it doesn't, it'll be debugged.

I think that the bigger question is whether the rate of spam website creation will outpace the rate of human flagging of them.

Kagi's process involves humans. I bet that the spam website stuff runs autonomously.

You are paying for search, just differently.

https://proton.me/blog/what-is-your-data-worth

https://wallethub.com/blog/bad-google-results-for-0-apr/157511

Your money, or your personal data, used for whatever damned purpose they choose.

That’s really the choice.

Running services costs money.

Can anyone here convince me it's worth the price?

Depends on what you want from them and your financial situation.

For me, yeah, it is. I want to pay a service fee and not deal with ads or someone logging, profiling, and trying to figure out how to monetize my searches. For me, the $10/mo for unlimited searches tier is what I want. I'm principally concerned about privacy.

I don't really take much advantage of most of the extra stuff they do other than the Threadiverse (they call it "Fediverse Forums") search lens and sometimes their Usenet search engine. Maybe this effort to suppress AI-generated spam websites will be nice, but have to see what happens, as I expect that the SEO crowd creating spam websites will also aim to adapt if it becomes sufficiently impactful to their bottom line.

If one of their extra features particularly fits your use case (say, the ability to fiddle with website priorities or blacklist or pin them in your search results) that might be valuable to you, but I can't speak as to that. I've seen people on here say that they really like that, but I don't use that functionality. Or the ability to easily download images in results from their image search if you're on mobile and are hitting something like pinterest, which is obnoxious on Google Images. Search bangs. Depends on what features you use and what each is worth to you.

They have a free trial. Convince yourself

Which is perfectly fine. Not everybody needs to search for things day to day. There are some professions where search is important; law and software are two which are more relevant to me. Getting accurate, non hallucinating results is really important.

Absolutely. I've been using it for a month and it feels like Google, but before they enshittified. DDG was my previous goto search engine, but it's gotten really bad as well. Especially the aggressive keyword replacements drove me almost insane.

Yes

I enjoy it. They have a 100-search free trial so you can test it out for yourself. Between them down ranking sites full of trackers and allowing you to put your own preferential ratings on sites, I find myself getting the results I'm after so much quicker.

I think so. I’ve been using it for over a year, as another poster said Kagi feels like Google did 15 years ago, before it destroyed itself.

Every time I use a search on another machine, my first reaction is “oh my god what is all of this shit everywhere? ads, spam, AI slop, shopping garbage, etc”, then I quickly realize it’s not my computer and that’s just what Google looks like now.

Startpage is OK

Then I have great news for you! Kagi accept bitcoin, does not validate email addresses (so you can register as fhhdsbgwg@hrjesbgwgw.com if that appeals to you), and they implemented privacy pass tokens that fully anonymize your searches. They also allows searching through tor!

Just use their third party crypto payment service. It doesnt transmit any of this. Perhaps look this kind of thing up prior to insinuating these things are required for Kagi.

They have a no-log, no-profile policy, which is why I use them.

Wait, 2-person

Edit: oh, my dad and I both subscribe. I might even do the family plan and bring my wife into it.