I have been using kagi in combination with DuckDuckGo for search lately and just recently decided to try kagi out as my daily driver after being impressed with the results. For those who don’t know anything about the relatively new engine, here is their own answer to “What is Kagi Search?":
Kagi Search is a quick, user-centric, 100% privacy-respecting search engine with results augmented by non-commercial indexes and personalized searches. It has a clean, high-performance user interface with only the most relevant results and no telemetry, no ads and no collection of private information. Read more about its unique features.
We hope it will help users amplify their abilities and make them more creative and smarter as well as more productive.
Which for me checks two core boxes:
- aims to respect user privacy
- ads do not factor into their revenue stream
In regard to the first, user privacy today is paramount. The status quo of so many services is to offer a “free” experience while mining the user’s interactions and other data/metadata to then profit and police which seems inherently dishonest to me. Respecting privacy allows the user more agency in her/his interactions with a service.
The second box ties in nicely with the first: ad revenue can be handled appropriately, but there is an incentive to, in a sense, “poison the well” and start mining user data to provide more targeted ads and increase ad revenue. Adding ad revenue to your business model could one day pit the advertiser against the everyday customer in terms of privacy if that isn’t how the relationship starts out. Kagi is subscription based, currently $10/month or $120/year so there is no incentive at the moment to serve more than the needs of just the “searchee” user base.
Lastly, the introduction of more players in the search market gives me hope that Google’s dominance will be whittled away and force them to compete again. So here’s to new tools and more options!