¬ just serendipity 🍀 (not just serendipity)

TL;DR: Kagi is a web search engine.

Why would you use something other than Google, you may ask? That’s out of scope of this post. If you think Google is the best and there’s no need to replace your search engine, this post is not for you.

A while ago I had switched my default search engine from Google to ChatGPT Search, but that didn’t last long; eventually I settled on DuckDuckGo.

Last week, a friend told me he got a trial of Kagi. It wasn’t the first time I’ve heard of it: John Gruber also blogged about it.

Then I decided to try it out myself as well. In general I am happy with DuckDuckGo, but we can always try something new, and the company materials have really impressed me.

I emailed someone at the company and got an 1-month trial of their Professional plan¹ – which includes unlimited searches. This is important: there should be no decision fatigue nor anxiety about hitting a ceiling in the number of monthly searches.

What is Kagi? In a Nutshell:

Kagi has no ads and is fully supported only by its users. We worked very hard to provide high quality, fast and tracking-free results at a minimum cost to ensure sustainability of our operation. By choosing a paid Kagi plan, you are also helping accelerate our mission of humanizing the web.

Why should I pay for search?

You’re already paying with your time and attention to advertisers who manipulate your search results, waste your time, and exploit your privacy. Pay with your wallet instead of your life, and get pure, powerful search that works for you — not advertisers. Read more.

What happens if I don’t use any searches?

In months where you don’t utilize any searches on your plan, we will automatically apply a full credit to your account. This credit will be applied to your next billing cycle, effectively covering your subsequent month’s subscription at no additional cost.

See also their FAQ and privacy policy:

Why does Kagi return so few results?

Kagi only shows you actually relevant search results, so you may be confused when Kagi returns 57 results and another, ad supported, search engine returns 2.6 million results. This is, in part, because ad supported search engines have different incentives and want you to stay on their site longer, going through pages and pages of results, as every interaction is another opportunity to serve ads.

Kagi, conversely, strives to deliver the most relevant, unique results within the top three.

What data does Kagi collect?

Only bare necessities to run the service. Please see our privacy policy and our documentation about privacy protection for more information.

Kagi’s business model is unlike any other search engine in the world. This means we don’t need or want your personal information (it would just be an unwelcome liability). By choosing this business model we know that we are going to have far less users than mainstream search engine for example, but we have also removed any incentive to misuse any information you have shared with us.

Privacy is a Kagi Feature

At Kagi, you are our customer, not the product being sold The deal is simple: Our customers pay for a service and we provide them with a service. This business model ensures Kagi’s and our customers’ interests are always aligned.

We value your privacy, and whenever possible we will choose not to require or save any user data. For Kagi, user data is only a liability — we do not need or want it. Still, operating a paid service may require some basic information from our customers, and this document describes how we use it to the best of our ability.

See for yourself Our technology choices show we’re serious about privacy. You can check them in your browser.

Unlike most websites, we do not load any analytics or telemetry.

Unlike most search engines, we do not track which search result you choose to click.

When viewing images, videos or other media results, or using the Kagi Assistant, we protect your privacy by proxying all connections and data through our servers.

We store only the bare minimum of cookies, those required to handle basic application functionality, such as logging in.

I am currently digging through their documentation. There’s a lot to read! There’s no need to, but I am trying to assess whether to pay for them once the trial ends.

Overall I am quite bullish about them. I have already updated all my browsers in all my devices (including work) to them. I believe immersion is a very effective way to evaluate a product.

They support bangs, just like DuckDuckGo, meaning that I can append (for example) !g or !ddg to bail out to Google or DuckDuckGo, respectively. I find their user experience around bangs much better than DuckDuckGo’s:

• first, there’s a bang explorer (community-created), and the bang sources are open
• it’s possible to add custom bangs
• it’s possible to add custom search engines

As a practical example: I can invoke their Summarizer to make a summary of a page:

!sum <url>

Or “I am feeling lucky” with ! {search term}.

There’s API access.

There’s built-in Translation (Kagi Translate), accessible at https://translate.kagi.com/:

Add translate.kagi.com/ before any URL for instant translation. No apps needed. Access 244 languages with zero tracking. Install our browser bookmarklet for quick access.

Kagi Translate is free for everyone. If you’re not a logged in Kagi user, you’ll encounter a simple captcha to prevent automated abuse — a small step that helps us maintain quality while keeping the service free. Kagi members get direct access without captchas, integrating seamlessly with their existing workflow.

Kagi Search Stats: it keeps healthily growing.

Kagi Performance: it is fast and lightweight.

If you append a question mark (?) to a search query, then it automatically invokes a LLM (‘quick answer’) to summarize results:

Even with an engine as powerful as Kagi you may not be interested in reading every resulting page and want a synthesis of the information as well as references to important pages in the search result. Kagi’s Quick Answer quickly produces a summary of the results across the pages returned and provides references to the pages that are used. This functionality allows you to quickly consume the desired information from the search while giving you the pointers to dive deeper into the information if desired.

Once you have search results returned you can select Quick Answer to quickly transform the information on the page into the easier to digest format. Additionally, if you add a question mark at the end of your query ("?") Quick Answers will trigger automatically, making it even more convenient to get to the information you need swiftly. You can also trigger Quick Answer by pressing ‘q’ on your keyboard, after the results have loaded.

I’ll end this post now, otherwise I’d just be parroting the entire Kagi Documentation here. TL;DR: So far, so good.

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Edit(2025-05-14): After using Kagi for about 10 days, I am happy to report that I’ve been quite happy with them. There’s no doubt they have a great product.

The question to ask yourself is whether it’s worth paying $10 / month for their professional plan, or whether DuckDuckGo is enough for you. If you can have your company expense them, then it’s definitely a no-brainer.