Is Kagi Search getting better?
I have €350 prepaid gift card, my main job relies on searching the web. Is my Christmas gift going to be well spent if I go all in on annual Kagi plan? Merry Christmas to those that celebrate btw
Personally, when I started using it a few months ago, I did not expect that I would stick with it, but here I am.
1. I was able to find some specific images (that I remembered from years ago), that I had looked for before in the main search providers but I had given up, as the AI generated, SEO optimised spam was destroying image search. That was the first moment I thought that this offers something more.
2. The bangs (shortcuts for specialsied searches)/lenses (profiles narrowing down the search space) offer a great user experience.
3. Do I detect a site I do not want in my search results? I do not need to complain to anybody, I just block it in the settings.
3. I use the ultimate plan because lenses/bangs work synergetically with the custom assistants, though there would be ways to use it. But that's also because I do not have other LLM subscriptions anyway, so it works well enough for me.
4. While I can imagine getting browser extensions that provide similarish experience, I like the fact of using a product that is actually designed around this type of user experience and the idea of search business being user-centric rather than ad-centric. Plus kagi combines results from multiple providers, so essentially the results can be better than individual providers (and they are).
5. The only thing that worries me is that while search itself seems very good and my experience has been great, it seems that a lot of effort now is spent in search-adjacent stuff (kagi maps, translate, assistants) which while sounding great ideas, they are products that require a lot of effort in integrations/UX to become really useful, and currently there is not as much (even if purely the results eg translating a text are actually very good). But it can also go to become very good products, we will see.
But just honestly I would say to just get a free 100 searches subscriptions and actually see if that works good enough for you to justify the money spent, nobody else can tell this for you.