So I’ve been using Kagi for a while now as a paid search engine. I always thought it’s $25 a month plan was a little steep for search, but a) I got work to pay for it, and b) startpage nee google was getting less and less useful, and bing and whatever used it has… well been worse for me always.
Anyway, I just got told that they’ve now adjusted their pricing / added features to Ultimate, and I think (at least now) that’s actually added a lot of value if you’re into the more advanced LLVM / AI models / chat. I have also been paying $20 a month through work for ChatGPT Plus. I might drop that because Kagi now lets you chat with / use GPT4 as well as Claude2 and a Google LLVM model with the one $25 a month, in addition to all the search and AI Search (with sourcing) together.
I don’t know how well paid search is going to ever do - it might be a short term tool. But for now, not having ads in the search, a straightforward pay for service model that seems to work just as well with their stated privacy goals, and getting multiple AI LLVM is pretty cool “one stop shopping” if you will. I also like giving a shot to less ad based models for Internet services that I can’t see how they don’t become privacy invasions.
The $10 plan gives you unlimited searches. The $25 plan has additional features like AI. For comparison, OpenAI charges $20/month for premium access to ChatGPT, with free accounts being rate-limited, and not having access to the latest model. And of course all ChatGPT users have their usage tracked.
I haven’t signed up for a paid plan yet, but I’ve been using the free plan (which has limits on searches and AI use) for a little while now and it seems pretty good. It’s not a slam dunk, since I found myself going back to Google a couple times and getting better results there. But it seems pretty good overall, and the FastGPT chatbot has been consistently giving me better results than Bing Chat.
If you believe Kagi’s privacy statement, they are not logging your searches, and the account is only used to track membership. I don’t like the idea of being logged in either, but it’s something.
I will likely revert to duckduckgo or something similar for incognito search, personally.
Paying for web site access is a hard pill to swallow, but I’m afraid the time of reckoning has come. I’ve been part of the problem for decades, using sites and services that are, by their ad-supported nature, misaligned with my interests. Google’s dominance has ruined not only the quality of searches, but the quality of journalism and other content across the entire internet, since the primary goal of anyone trying to make money on the internet is to get at the top of Google results. This is why you can’t find a cookie recipe without scrolling through some absurd human-interest story. It’s why you can’t read news articles without clicking through slideshows. It’s why you can’t find pretty much any meaningful product reviews without researching it like it’s a goddamn dissertation.
The poison of advertising has seeped into the groundwater of the internet. I hope that in time we can reverse the damage. I don’t know if Kagi’s business model is the way forward, but I’m damn well sure the status quo of advertising and user tracking is not.