I've asked a number of times on HN threads for specific examples of searches that Kagi performs better on than DDG or Google, and never gotten a solid reply. It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same or possibly worse. That's cool, but I don't find it worth the cash personally.
> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling
I've been paying for Kagi since March 2025, so about a year and a half and this is precisely why. The search quality is far better than Google of 2025 (last I used Google at least). Yes, it is probably worse than Google from a decade or two ago, but no one's getting those days back after Google decided that prioritizing garbage links for ads > getting people off the search results page quickly.
I think what you are missing is that the customization is *extensive* for the search results. You can pin/raise/lower/block specific websites: so no more GeeksforGeeks if you don't want to see it, (or outright block specific image websites that flood results like pinterest), and pin (niche forums, reddit etc. that you like to see) to the top of your results page instead of having to add site:<domain here> every time to the box to get usable results.
URL rewriting lets you redirect any results URL to any other URL. Which means you can redirect youtube links to your self hosted instance of PeerTube if you like or redirect x.com links to xcancel.
Plus, you can create custom lenses to scope your results. (lenses are akin to "images", "News", "Videos" etc. on the top bar of google) but defined by you. I have one to return academic articles, and a developer-focused one (like documentation and SO). Another example of a lens that I use occasionally, is to only return results that have PDFs.
This is where the power of Kagi is tbh. The raw search results are a blank sheet you massage into the output you want to see.
i love that geeksforgeeks is the website everyone mentions wanting to block :D
> It seems what people like about Kagi is the customization and surrounding tooling, but the actual search quality is about the same
For me the quality of results is improved exactly because of the customization. Removing sites which I don't trust, are low quality, spammy, etc.
Also, Google isn't scraping your data....
I invite you to spend 10$ to try Kagi for 1 month. Try these features:
- Custom CSS. - Personalized search result: pin / block / raise / lower website on result. - Assistant: try the standard Assistant with Kiki K2.6 (reasoning), try to create custom assistant...
Kagi is a product package provides premium experience in retrieving knowledge from the Internet, it's not only search. No word can exchange for a personal experience with an open heart.
Potentially as good as Google without the surveillance isn’t worth $50/yr?
Also as a now-daily kagi user, I don’t know what sort of evidence you’re looking for. I search, the hits are good.
You can just try it for free and not wait around for others to write a report for you. They give you 100 searches.
I have. Like I said, the results were the same or worse than DDG and Google. It was not noticeably better in any way, certainly not something I want to pay $50 for.
I think it’s well worth it but we all make compromises. I have an iPhone after all lol.
They are much better than DDG or Google in financing russian invasion into Ukraine