What's Next for Kagi?

BOOM! That's great news to hear. I've been paying for Kagi since the early adopter days and it's become one of my most used tools. It'd be really painful to replace it at this point and I hope Kagi stays in it for the long haul.

Just look at that side by side comparison with Google. I haven't used it without a adblocker in so long it's a shock. It's gotten really bad.

We are delighted to support you as a customer and see your growth. Alternative search options are needed more than ever and becoming increasingly appreciated. We too are doing our bit in search, with a different business model and shared values about empowering a "human-centric and sustainable web that benefits individuals, communities, and society as a whole".

There have been several others that attempted this. They didn't succeed. But they're not the first.

I'm using SearXNG myself, which is quite similar to Kagi in that it combines search results from the other big parties (google, bing, brave). It's not quite as configurable (e.g. choosing to omit certain sites from the search results is not possible, but you can tune the relevance of each source search engine) but it serves me well and it's fully self-hosted. It can also easily integrate with more 'grey area' sources like torrent sites which is nice.

I try Kagi once in a while but I'm not yet conviced to pay for it - it is quite expensive by European (Spanish) standards. And I like to keep things under my own control. When I spend money I prefer it to go to hardware, hosting, knowhow etc. I even run an ollama server just so I don't have to use ChatGPT (for most things).

I try Kagi once every few months to see if it's significantly better than my own setup which so far hasn't really been the case. But I wish them well! :)

One feature request, I actually wanted to brag about how long I've used it, and went to my account but couldn't see a "member since...", or a full purchase history. Seems like it would be a small but awesome feature :)

Extremely exciting. Google Maps has gotten significantly worse in the last couple of years, finally passing the threshold of enshittification by instructing me to turn "at the <fast food seafood restaurant>" instead of just telling me the road name late last year. Search for points of interest has gotten awful, just as bad as Google Search, the Play Store, and the App Store with sponsored content taking over all usable space for basic searches (seriously, I do not want you to prioritise <fast food donut restaurant> when I search for "diner" or "coffee shop").

If Kagi can prioritise useful search results, trade ads for a monthly subscription, and contribute meaningful data back into OpenStreetMaps as a backend, I would subscribe in an instant. Currently DuckDuckGo is enough to meet my web search needs, but I desperately need a good alternative to Google Maps. Unfortunately Osmand is just not a great interface for most of my needs, and has no Android Auto support, either.

But regular Kagi is one of those “take it out of my cold dead hands” sort of techs. Now that the iOS extension mostly works for bang redirects and such, it’s been a great experience on all platforms.

I have an iOS shortcut built around the Summarizer that has been invaluable for my TL;DR moments on sprawling articles. If I get bored I share to that shortcut and instantly get back bullet points in a popup window. Brilliant.

I’m happy to hear Kagi is successful and will likely be around for awhile. Going back to straight Google or DDG would be rough.