Why pay for a search engine

I'm almost exactly one year into my Kagi purchase, and I've got to say I'm loving it. Since this was just an experiment, I purchased the smallest level I could, which is now Starter, but back then it was a bit different.

Some people want unlimited, and I understand that, but if you're on the fence, I'd suggest just getting Starter. Seeing how fantastic search can be is incredible. I can completely remove abusive domains (Fandom, Pinterest) from search results. I can get search results from only the small web. I just get better results overall.

For those curious, in the past year I've only made ~1700 searches. That seems low, but that's what it says. I have made some changes to my search habits, though. For instance, when I'm looking for a result on Wikipedia, instead of just searching for it, I go to Wikipedia, same with IMDB, and similar sites. Sometimes, I search for something that I know will need a result from a disallowed domain, so I use DuckDuckGo for that. And I still use DDG for work searches, and some other miscellaneous searches.

Again, if you're on the fence, just try it out. It is so, so, so much better than Google or DDG.

Fyi you can search "titanic movie Wikipedia !" And when you use a bang it doesn't count against your searches. Or at least that's what it was like before I moved to the unlimited plan :)

I hit my year too just two weeks ago. I always think "is it worth it" when the payment hits my credit card, but every time I come to the conclusion that it is very much worth it.

Just the universal summariser has saved me insane amounts of time. I can feed any rambling youtube video (with subtitles) or a long article to it and it'll give me the key points of it. Then I can decide whether it's worth spending an time on or not.

Something like this is the future of "AI" in my opinion, you can "teach" the system what you're interested in and it can curate content just for you - locally, without an unicorn startup getting all your data.

Thank you! I think I’ll use quick bangs even more: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/bangs.html#quick-bangs

You can just use !w to search Wikipedia, no need for the "I'm feeling lucky" bang

I've been doing the same but using the browser shortcut to select a search engine. If I start with "k " it searches with Kagi, with "g " it's Google, etc.

I've been using Kagi only for non-trivial searches, so the starter plan has been enough. For very local searches (mainly about a local business or finding where to buy a product) I use Google. And most of my searches are just looking up the url to a website (like searching "steam"), so any search engine will do (I default to Duckduckgo for that).

Why waste that time and mental effort to save literal pennies? Isn't your limited time alive on this incredible earth worth more? This is like driving the whole afternoon around town to find the cheapest gas.

I agree, I started this way to test it out and just kept doing it. Although it saves 65€/year, not pennies. And I'm in Europe so I don't earn nearly as much as the average American engineer.

I would still select the search engine for a number of queries though. I find Google better for local stuff, use WolframAlpha for computations, and Perplexity for LLM answers.

Google Maps is the undisputed king for local results. Not even Apple has any chance of contending that throne, much less Kagi. My prediction is that maps will become the core of Google's search business quite soon.