Hey sorry if this has been asked before. I checked and didn’t see any posts, but basically is the kagi search engine worth it? I’m gearing up to cancel Hulu/spotify so I’ll have a little more money in the monthly budget and Kagi is one of the things I’m considering

Currently I use DuckDuckGo and it’s pretty good for me, but the main thing that makes me interested in Kagi is the ability to rank websites so they appear more or less often and the filter by type like academic sources or Reddit only.

I don’t really like ai stuff (not inherently, it’s just shoved into everything so I’ve come to hate it) but it seems pretty unobtrusive in Kagi?

I want to hear from people who actually pay for and use Kagi. Is the 300 searches a month enough for you or do most of you need the unlimited search plan? I know about the free trial but I want to know about the long term user experience

Edit: Thank you to everyone who responded!! I learned a lot about Kagi and I think I’m gonna end up getting the 300/mo plan and see if it’s enough for me. Thanks again! <3

  • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
    12·
    5 days ago

    I do not regret it.

    I don’t really use the bangs to use Google instead like I did on duck duck go. I think I’ve used them a few times in a year, and heat when I was deep into not finding something which I continued to not find on google.

    I haven’t had to rerank sites in a while

    You can get the AI answers if you append a question mark to your query, or you can use !ki to use the AI researcher tool. It’s all opt in. They’ll also tell you how much of your AI budget you’ve used.

    Under the good Kagi is an “AI” search engine using BERT architecture, which is similar to Google (it takes your natural language question and searches that, instead of classical keyword based search). That doesn’t mean it doesn’t work or doesn’t respect keywords, but sometimes you do have to quote keyword groups to enforce them.

    I’m pretty sure their index is built at a higher quality than Google who are trying to answer every low quality query and maximize metrics.

    • FearMeAndDecay@literature.cafeOPEnglish
      2·
      5 days ago

      That’s good to know about how the search engine actually works! Having the ai stuff be opt-in instead of opt-out is also a huge plus. Thank you!