I feel like half of what I do on HN is talk about Kagi. I switch to Kagi in 2023, and haven't looked back. Between vim keybinds for navigating search, explicit AI opt-in, the ability to curate search (block sites, increase others), and more. It really lets me feel like I can control my search tool, and at least so far its felt like our interests are aligned, I give them money and they make sure search is as good as possible for me.
They're still ultimately scraping other engines pages to get the results though. The last time this was discussed an engineer on their team told me that they were building their own index internally, but I couldn't get any additional information about that and it doesn't appear to be in their docs.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Why is it bad if they're using other engines to produce results?
I like paying to invest in a new sustainable ecosystem. Using SERP API doesn't feel like that to me. See Brave for a counterexample.
If engine A uses the results of engine B, and engine B uses the results of engine A, there is a problem :-).
Do they let you chose to not send your search queries to say Yandex or Google?
I can't imagine they don't. I just run my own searxng and turn on the engines I want.
I dont use it anywhere near as much because it felt like I was hitting their limits too quickly, not sure if that has changed.
Do you know what their upper limit is? I average 1900 queries/month so I'm curious where they drew the line for you.
I've subscribed for years. I've never hit a limit once.
I tried Kagi a year or two ago but it just didn't have most results. Google always had what I was looking for.
I might try it again sometime.