I’ve been using it for about a year and a half, on the unlimited plan. I pay for the year up front for the discount. There’s no way I’m willingly going to stop using Kagi. I’m a developer and perform about 2500 searches a month.

The ability to adjust the ranking of domains and the lenses save me a ton of time. No other engine comes close to the productivity.

You can easily talk to the developers and founder, too. I’ve had many of my suggestions actually implemented. It’s great when you pay for the service and they are in it for you, not your data.

I’ve been using Kagi since their public beta, and paying for it has been a no brainer. For programming related searches it isn’t even comparable to Google, as there are very little/no SEO spam re-post garbage sites (like the ones that just scrape and reformat GitHub issues or stack overflow questions). And if there are, I block those domains and never see them again. For all other searches, I have the same experience of better results with less garbage.

The lack of ads has many great advantages, somewhat obviously. Results load faster, my pihole doesn’t break anything, I can see the top result immediately, I never click a sponsored result on accident, etc. I don’t really use many of the advanced features like lenses or GPT functionality and still feel like I get my moneys worth every single month.

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I’ve been using it since last year. It’s always been much better than the mostly unusable ones Google has given me for years now. It’s the best $10 I spend. It saves me time.

I’ve been a Kagi user since launch, and it has completely replaced everything for me except image searches. It’s the best $10 I spend each month.

I was chatting about it yesterday here in this thread

https://lemmy.pub/post/77321

• I use the 10/month plan with a $5.0 soft limit and a $10 hard limit, though I have yet to exceed my plan quota at all.

• I have used it since hearing about it on HN a couple months ago during one of the DDG controversies.

• Its completely replaced my search engine. I use it on my work machines, personal machines and phone for all searching.

• Most searches are probably work related ie: Systems Admin, “Devops” (depending on your definition of the term), Security etc etc but also random thoughts. Heck today i was searching for flounder lights on it.

• I generally find I have to refine searches less often, and rarely do I need to use bangs to pipe a search to DDG. I have had co-workers mention in recent months that they are always amazed that I will find very relevant sources fairly quickly, often ones that they cant get a front page hit on even when looking for it because i mentioned it. Though that may speak more to how I structure searches already since Kagi is fairly new to me.

• I use the filters/lenses quite often. The recipes one is awesome for a lot of the cooking/smoking I do. Programming is solid too.

• I would NOT reccomend this for general use yet unless it has a specific value add, such as with me and work. For example my wife still uses DDG (because i put her on it) and probably google on work devices or something. Its fine for her and thus for me. I would only reccomend it if you happen to work in a specific field that has a TON of crap sourcing/junk articles that are SEO gamed (ie: Tech) or you specifically align with the privacy ideology.

• the account thing is only for stripe for billing for now, they go have a greyed out and unchecked box enable query history. I have seen it mentioned you can use a totally fake email to sign up (since it doesnt necessarily require verification) though the owner has recommended against it for obvious reasons. Adding crypto options brings baggage, I think he just tied it to stripe to the ease of billing/use.

My main search engine is Mojeek, and my secondary search engine is Kagi. I’ve paid for Kagi for over a year, and it gets good results. I think it’s great that every part of both search engines work without Javascript, and that Kagi’s results pages are very light. It’s also cool that it returns results for pages in the Internet Archive, which can be useful for certain esoteric topics. I’m de-ranking certain sites so they’re pushed to the bottom of results, like quora, twitter, w3schools, and reddit.

There are also no ads! At all! I used Duckduckgo in a VM today and it was dreadful how far you have to scroll just to get past the ads and see the actual results.

Kagi gets great results. My only problem is that, just like Duckduckgo, they use the Bing API. Now, Kagi actually uses their own non-commercial index Teclis, combined with their news index Tinygem, as well as calling Google’s API and many other search engine APIs (including Mojeek). My main search engine is Mojeek because they use their own index.

I’ve found Kagi great for technical/日本語 queries, which is something Mojeek doesn’t handle well. If I want to learn about a certain topic, I search Wikipedia directly. I think Kagi is the nicest and fanciest Bing/Google proxy around, with easily the best user experience of any search engine.

I’m weirded out by their “why need an account” explanation when Mullvad has a perfectly viable solution that doesn’t require one. “We don’t link your queries to you” is a vastly different claim from a “we can’t link your queries to you” one. Still, considering who we compare them to…

On a personal note, Google search is so infuriatingly shitty lately that I’d been thinking about switching to another service. This does look to be worth a try.