I don’t like the quick answers on search engines, it’s neither fish nor fowl. If I want an AI response I’ll use an AI. So I was using Kagi when I was looking for pages, not synthesising search results on my behalf.
And yeah the AI Assistant came with the free trial and I tried it out, but Perplexity Pro is light years ahead as an AI assisted search, it’s not even close. Honestly it looked like a proof of concept, so I didn’t really factor that into my consideration as I assumed it was still in development.
My experience of Kagi was (I tried it, even paid for it for some time) - Kagi is made for people who are, in some mysterious (or rather I should say “specific”?) ways, predisposed to like Kagi.
For anyone else Kagi makes very close to zero sense (I am one of those people to whom Kagi just doesn’t make sense).
For the former - it might be some kind of a placebo. Or an oddly satisfying feeling of getting to pay for something and form a usefulness bond or so. Or it might actually be useful which we would possibly never know
Since I‘m recommending Kagi to other people, could you explain what about Kagi doesn’t make sense to you? (No worries: I won’t try to explain it to you. I‘m just genuinely curious to understand the perspectives of others.)
After that show, I decided to give Kagi a try. I pay the $10/month plan and it is enough. I compared it against Google Search and also Perplexity AI.
Reasons I chose Kagi:
CEO is a decent human being, who clearly puts the customer/user first. He even promises to find a small way to pay creators if ever makes enough money to do so. Compare that to the Perplexity CEO, he is clear, your data is the product he is selling…
Privacy - my search history is not shared with anyone else
Better search results - because it does things like hide listicles. In google, I find the top 10-20 results are basically the same thing over.
Better Summarization - the Kagi summarization tells me what is sourcing for a claim. I almiost always click through to read carefully. With Google it is blind faith in the AI summary. (I think the fancy name for this feature is Quick Answer. hat tip to @timstringer for reminding me of this)
I’m continuing to enjoy Kagi Search six weeks into my one-year subscription for the reasons you mentioned. I also appreciate features that are unique to Kagi (e.g. being able to rank sites) and find the Quick Answer feature handy.
I’m looking forward to seeing how Kagi Search and the team’s other products evolve.
