I tried it because I was less and less happy with Google and the various free alternatives never quite hit it. With them, I'd have to go back to Google every now and then to get better results. I thought I'll try Kagi for a month or two and see.
With Kagi, I think I've gone back to Google a couple of times in the early period. Then not once, since last winter. On browsers where I'm not logged onto Kagi I've gone from Google to my primary browser with Kagi multiple times. I can't really tell if Kagi is good or bad, objectively, but in relative terms it's very good. Most importantly, it's quite invisible, doesn't have irritating things to fight with, and the first two pagefuls aren't sponsored ads. It's tool-like and it certainly gives the feel of 2000's Google Search.
I don't know if I'm a fan but I still also have no reason to stop using Kagi. I like the simple concept. And I think paying for search is a good proposition because it turns the odds to my favour: the company can succeed by making me happy instead of using me to make advertisers happy.
I really like it, but for the cost of a cup of coffee you could try it for a month as well. I highly suggest you just do that: commit to spending a month using it, and if you don't like it at the end cancel. Maybe it won't work for the way you use search, maybe it will, the only way to find out is to try.
I used Kagi for a few months, it was the best search experiemce I've seen, but in the end I decided I didn't value that enough. I use Ecosia now, it's fine- worse, but free.
I guess it's down to you how much you value web search. Kagi does have an AI tool as well, but I didn't use this and don't use AI search anyway, so can't comment on how it compares.
It varies from person to person because everyone uses search differently. Someone I know swears by it and loves it. I tried it for three months using only Kagi and it didn’t feel worth it to me, so I went back to Google. Your experience might be different so my suggestion is to try it yourself if you can.
I still don't understand why Google gets such a bad rep. I think it's fine. And about AI "summarizing" web results: while sometimes useful, you absolutely need to check the source. AI can make stuff up, and it can also summarize wrong (when the source does exist).
With google I can't find things I know exist. For example, it doesn't find several of my github repositories with unique names that have been there for years. With old google you could drill down a couple of pages of results, but they're not there now. It also prefers worse sources for materials, for example some blog which poorly explains some API, rather than the original documentation.
My honest review - Kagi is really, really great. Been using it almost a year now.
The search results are much more relevant, there are no ads or hallucinated BS AI summaries at the top, and you're not giving Google your data (and money) to further enshittify the world.
There are features I haven't tried yet so can't speak to them, but that's my very general take on the default kagi experience.
The perception of Kagi at HN is extremely positive, but in my personal experience the search quality reminds me more of Bing than Google, with Kagi sometimes surfacing puzzling results first. Also, I wasn't thrilled about giving them access to all my search data. As flawed as Google may be, I still believe they have better privacy standards than Kagi.
Same, I tried it only because its spoken highly here and I dropped it after paying for a year. I was not able to find what I wanted at least 25% of the time, not worth it to pay.
I use Kagi at home and Google at work, and IME Kagi results are much better compared to Google. It's easy enough to jump to Google by adding !g, but I never find myself actually using that... I do however end up doing the reverse, where I'll not find the result I'm looking for on my work computer and then quickly repeat the search on Kagi on my phone. I used to use DuckDuckGo on my personal devices before, and while it was mostly fine, I did have to jump to Google more frequently. In the end sometimes the results were better on DDG and sometimes on Google. I haven't really found any situation where Google results were better than Kagi (I do tend to prefer Google Images results, but I only very rarely use image search, maybe once a month).
There was also an instance recently where I was helping out a coworker get set up with something. I had done it earlier in the day, so I told him something like "type in $SEARCH_TERM, then go to the first page and copy the commands from there". He put it into Google, couldn't find the right result, tried a few variations, still couldn't find it. I pulled Kagi up on my phone, searched the same term, and slacked him the page while he was still looking around on Google.
