Who would have thought? After religiously using it for around 25 years1 (and working there for 6), I stopped using Google as my default search engine for now. What happened?
There have been on-going complaints about the declining quality of Google search results. I didn’t really mind it, and always used to find what I was looking for.
More importantly though, „Artificial Intelligence“ (AI) happened. As an official AI sceptic, I believe it can have some good use cases, given the right conditions and guardrails. On the other hand, I particularly object to any shoving of „AI“ features in my face where I don’t want or need them (as happens increasingly everywhere these days 🙄). So I hate how Google now increasingly comes up with „AI Overviews“ on top of organic search results, which cannot be disabled.
Anecdotally, people are moving away from Google and to other solutions anyway. I heard from people that they prefer Perplexity for its „AI“ capabilities, or use ChatGPT straight away. Obviously, no options for the AI sceptic crowd. But there’s also a new-ish alternative: Kagi. Technically, its‘ a meta search engine (meaning it combines results from different sources as well as their own). Most famously, it uses a radical, new business model: users pay for their searches!
Kagi
This sounds bizarre off-hand, but actually has significant advantages. There are no ads, and Kagi collects little to no data on you – turning around the famous quote. With Kagi, you’re not the product. you’re the customer.
I had heard of Kagi before, and done some test searches, but Google remained my go-to Search Engine. Then I came across this excellent post on Ars Technica, „Enough is enough—I dumped Google’s worsening search for Kagi“ by Lee Hutchinson. This summarizes the reservations I had about Google’s AI features (most of which, like AI mode, are not yet rolled out in Europe), and gives a brilliant introduction to Kagi, along with detailed comparisons of Search Results Pages (SERP) in Kagi and Google. The author shares my motivation:
Mandatory AI summaries have come to Google, and they gleefully showcase hallucinations while confidently insisting on their truth. I feel about them the same way I felt about mandatory G+ logins when all I wanted to do was access my damn YouTube account: I hate them. Intensely.
and he finds similarly strong words for the benefits of Kagi:
You don’t have to look at AI droppings. You don’t have to give perpetual ownership of your mind-palace to a pile of optioned-out tech bros in sleeveless Patagonia vests while you are endlessly subjected to amateur AI Rorschach tests every time you search for „pierogis near me.“
Indeed, Kagi’s results look fine to great to me, also in German. There’s a ton of useful features, including bangs, which let you redirect a search by starting it with e.g. !w for Wikipedia or !g if you do want to search Google. You can also set up your own bangs. Also, you can select for each domain how much of it you want to see in your SERP – from „pin“ (always shows up) to „block“:
Ironically, I did end up using an „AI“ feature in Kagi several time: If you end your query with a question mark (so that it looks like an actual question), you get „Quick Answer„, an AI response which is a summary of the first few search results. This was accurate and useful when I used it. In good Kagi spirit, automatic quick answers (triggered by the question mark) can be activated or deactivated in settings.
I still have mixed feelings about how the AI features will develop, but at least, Kagi has shared a good, balanced position on AI in a blog post („Large language models (LLMs) should not be blindly trusted to provide factual information accurately“/ „LLMs are not intelligent in the human sense“).
How much is it?
So if Kagi makes money of users, how much is it?
- 100 searches are free (20 without signing up), so go ahead and try it!
- The starter plan, at 5$ (+)/ month, covers 300 searches, which, according to Kagi, is way more than the average Google or DuckDuckGo user does. Turns out I’m not average – I easily topped this, ending up in the
- Professional plan (unlimited searches, 10$+).
Check out the Plans page for details. There’s currently more than 50.000 paying users, which is not much, but the number is growing. Let’s see how it develops.
What does it mean?
I may stick with Kagi for the time being. Does that mean Google is doomed? I don’t think so. First of all, while Kagi is great for search nerds (and I hope some of you will sign up too!), the average user is likely not to care so much. Moreover, my gut feeling is that more people will switch to „AI“ tools like Perplexity or ChatGPT right away. Google still has a massive user base and I don’t see this changing anytime soon. The other question is what becomes of Google massive customer base – the small to huge enterprises who buy Google Ads, thus financing their entire business. This may face some major disruptions due to features like the AI Mode – but that’s a topic for another blogpost.
How about you?
Readers (Googlers/ Xooglers), how is your experience with Google search results? Are you still using it for all searches, or using alternatives? And which ones? Anyway, consider giving Kagi a try – it’s free to start with.
- I am still looking for evidence that I used Google (founded in 1998) before the turn of the millennium. ↩︎