I used to use it for 3 months, It’s pretty nice, but I prefer SearXng because It’s free and customizable if you tailor your search in SeaXng it’s pretty close to Kagi

I use kagi and I love it. When everyone else complains about search engines go to shit, I still get Kagi surfacing great finds or exactly what I’m looking for pretty consistently.

I’m also in the mood and in a financial place where paying for something is substantially better than watching ads. I want a product who’s purpose is to improve the functionality I purchased it for, and I want no reward structure that incentives lessening that ultimate goal.

I would say Kagi is worth it for anyone who has the capacity to pay for good software or donate to open source stuff.

Yeah, but I don’t get excited by it. I refuse to be the product rather than the user.

It isn’t a flawless experience which it really should be at the price point. I’ve had all sorts of slow response and timeouts issues in the last few months. Also, the maps feature is subpar even compared to bing.

It’s priced like a premium service, but you don’t get a premium experience. If you care a lot about not having ads and sponsored results displacing what you’re looking for, then yeah it’s worth it. But if you expect a nicer experience in pretty much any other regard vs google, you’re likely to be dissapointed.

Liking it a lot (I’ve been using for over 2 years now, 3?) but it’s expensive for what it offers.

Like mentioned in another comment for me discovering Kagi felt like when I first started using Google back in the 90s. It was so much better than whatever else was available, but not flawless. I wish for Kagi to not go the same shitty road as the Google search engine did (each time I see people using it I just can’t believe the useless crap it has turned into).

There is a trial offer (there was, back then at least) but I switched to their paid membership only 3 days after I started using it because there was no reason for me to wait longer: I was already very seduced by their zero ads, zero CEO crap, their great search results and then, to me that was the Oh, effing yeah! deciding factor, I noticed they let the user easily lower the ranking and/or completely exclude any domain from the search results. That plus, their ‘Small Web’ feature focusing the results on anything but the big websites (a great way to try to rekindle what the Web used to be before its corporate takeover). There is also their promise of not spying on us which I appreciate a lot, but it’s still an US company, submitted to US privacy-less laws. And then they offer a few other neat features (I don’t use their AI, I don’t want to use any AI for as long as it’s possible)

I still use the French Qwant next to Kagi, but Kagi is leagues ahead.

To me, filtering out some domains from the results is a blessing, exactly like the ability to mute some content/user on Lemmy ;)

Edit: they also offer a translate tool (https://translate.kagi.com/) and a minimalist News feed tool (https://kite.kagi.com/)

Yes, before it I used to jump between search engines to find good results, sometimes having to go back to Google… With kagi “it just works”

I’m still really happy with that and the integrated chat assistant. I use both everyday and love it.

Even if it wasn’t worth it, it would be worth it to get away from the spying