Kagi: A Google alternative that just kinda.. is?

Posted on by Leo Wattenberg

After seeing the raving reviews about Kagi by esteemed authors Doctorow and Koebler, I decided to use the search engine myself. Compared to my reviews of other services (especially: Ground News), this one is somewhat more difficult to grasp for me.

But just to get started, here’s some thoughts:

  • Using kagi becomes very transparent very quickly. I google search the internet extremely frequently, and have been burning through their trial period (100 searches) in about 2 days, causing me to get the unlimited plan for 10 USD a month. From then on out and with it set as default search engine, I hardly notice I’m using it vs Google.
  • Kagi is somewhat buggy and out of date. I searched for something Audacity related and filtered results for the past month, and was given a blogpost from many years ago – which I had deleted in october 2023! And a second one from the wiki which I deleted earlier than that even. I understand that my use case is a bit niche, but long-dead pages being indexed is a pretty big pain as it dilutes the actual results. I assume these to be simply bugs which are likely to get repaired reasonably soon – a less charitable reading would simply call
  • Kagi is better at finding results… – One of the toughest tasks I give to search engines is to put in potential groups for the the NYT Connections game. This time it was CARAMEL PEANUTS POPCORN PRIZE, which were the last group remaining but I couldn’t make rhyme or reason of what the connection between them was. Had I searched in DuckDuckGo, I’d only have found the answer keys (which I’m not interested in), had I searched with Google, I’d have almost exclusively found eCommerce links (first place being an amazon link for the actual solution, Cracker Jacks, but everything else being something else as it thinks of “PRIZE” as “PRICE”), but because I searched with Kagi, I did get an info panel about Cracker Jacks with a link to Wikipedia. Very nice!
  • … but it’s usually close… – subjectively, Kagi’s results feel pretty much on par with Google. I do still find SEO spam from time to time. In the cases where I bother checking both Kagi and Google, usually the results are pretty similar (for example Kagi will put MDN on and Stackoverflow on , while Google will have it the other way round).
  • … unless it’s about places. Searching for “Alsen”, the German name of a Danish island with 50k inhabitants, the results are good, but the second you go to the maps screen, Apple Maps takes over and plops you into the village of Alsen, part of the Osterstedt municipality which as a whole has 700 inhabitants. Searching for “Als”, it’s Danish/English name instead and going for the maps tab, the results are hilariously broad, with “Denkmal für die im Nationalsozialismus verfolgten Homosexuellen” making the cut. The opposite is also true, if you search for Berlin, Seedorf (a small village in Schleswig-Holstein), the map brings you to the place but brings up information about the Berlin you think it is:
A previously unknown capital and largest city in Germany has been discovered near Seedorf, between Tavenhost, Schlamersdorf and Wöbs.

I am unsure who to blame for this state of affairs, whether it’s Kagi or Apple Maps. If it’s Apple Maps fault, I’d highly advocate switching to OpenStreetMap. They don’t run into either of the above cases, and and their map layers also are much more useful (for me anyway – bike is my main transport method, which the Apple Maps embed doesn’t seem to have a layer for).

It’s worth pointing out here that Google lost the ability to show Google maps links for places in the EU due to the DMA1, so in order to compete here, they’d need to start ranking maps providers instead of having a tab.

  • Kagi’s filters (Lenses) are alright. I always found it weird that Google segregates its search engine into Google Scholar, Google Patents, and also hides very useful filters behind completely invisible operators and forms (do you know how to get to the Google Advanced Search page?). Kagi gives them a lot more affordance while keeping the page simple – good!

But with all that said, I have a really hard time deciding whether or not I like it. Which is a problem for something that’s supposed to be a review. Everything’s just luke-warm and alright, I suppose.

But something’s weird…

Kagi overall has a strange feel to it which at first was difficult to put a finger on. Take the following items:

  • In addition to a search engine, Kagi also makes a browser called Orion that exclusively runs on macOS and iOS. Why?
  • Kagi uses pretty grating language in their marketing materials, radiating smugness and snark against their competitors just before or after praising them. Why? On one page they pull up Bard to show “hey, even Google’s own bot thinks that we’re right!”
  • Kagi pretty strongly pushes privacy, and harps on about not having any telemetry. But compared to privacy-first options like mullvad VPN and duckduckgo, the amount of data required to use it (email + credit card number + full name) are pretty severe.2 Why does Kagi not go further with privacy?
  • A feature Kagi is noting weirdly prominently is speed and latency. Why? Search results hardly are useful by themselves, and the pages that are being loaded tend to be the main bottleneck.
  • The pricing is pretty steep3. Why? At 10 USD/month, it’s in the same bracket as things like spotify, while a reduction to 8 or 9 USD/month would avoid that comparison much more cleanly (and also remove the psychological barrier of double digit monthly fees).

Individually, some of these points may be written up to “oh, it’s a startup”, but in aggregate the weird feeling points to something else.

And I think I now know what it is: Kagi is a rich-founder-startup. It got founded by Vladimir Prelovac and financed exclusively out of his pocket between 2018-2023. Impressive! As such, it’s not the sort of company oozing of professionalism and iron-clad revenue optimization but rather:

Kagi, Prelovac’s personal pet peeve steamroller

With that lens, all of this weirdness makes a lot of sense. Vladimir Prelovac is an Apple user and very sensitive to latency, so he makes an Apple-only browser and search engine which has latency as a priority. He’s tired of SEO spam (which is very understandable considering he previously has done WordPress stuff), so downranking SEO spam is another priority of his.

This does mean that Kagi stands and falls on Vlad’s whim.

Vlad certainly has some of his incentives aligned with the paying customers of Kagi, but I highly doubt that a typical company dominated by homo oeconomicus-type leadership would go out of their way to create a browser and even explicitly hire in Japan for former Sleipnir or Shiira developers.

A browser doesn’t make too much strategic sense4 for something as deliberately niche as Kagi, but is massively expensive as those former Sleipnir people now will be pretty senior. And the monetization model of their Browser is akin to a YouTuber saying “if you like what you see, please join my Patreon”, so probably not too conducive for a larger scale operation like a browser would require.

Developing a browser certainly isn’t bad5, but it does mean that the company is less focused than it could be.

Finally, a verdict!

With the weird feeling above cleared out, I finally can formulate an opinion on Kagi: It’s very alright. No squirming, no second guesses.

  • If you want to avoid Google if at all possible, Kagi is the choice for search engines.
  • If you are very sensitive to latency, Kagi, Orion (and the text editor Zed) probably are the only products explicitly catering to your needs with some priority.

But:

  • If you’re anywhere near short on money, Kagi is too expensive for the benefits it brings.
  • If you’re annoyed by ads, get an Adblocker.
  • If you’re highly sensitive to privacy, DuckDuckGo + VPN or Tor + specialized browser + specialized linux distro remains the best option.
  • If Vlad starts Eloning, it’s time to high-tail out of there.

For me personally, I will continue using it for a while. I do like the idea of getting away from Google where possible, but 10$ a month for that privilege is right at the edge of the comfort zone for me. If I do need to save money anywhere, it certainly is the first subscription I’ll cancel.

Update

Minutes after this post went live, after sharing this to my circles, the following article was brought to my attention: https://d-shoot.net/kagi.html

It cements my perception that this is Prelovac’s personal pet peeve steamroller, with them starting an email service too, and using about a third of their investment money to set up a tshirt printer for their early subscribers. No rhyme or reason to the business plan. One day they got caught with their pants down because they forgot to pay VAT for 2 years.

Prelovac’s personal pet peeve steamroller is veering wildly across the coastal high road, and unless the driver gets his act together soon, it’s likely he’ll end up either in a ditch — or off the cliff.

It’ll be interesting to watch no matter the outcome.

  1. Basically, Google is so monopolistic at this point that Google Search cannot have some features which are entire services for other companies. So instead of searching for a place and immediately getting to Google maps (and only that), now the search results will have to speak for themselves. Who knows, maybe they’ll have a “map search tab” just like the video search tab where results from Google Maps, Open Street Map and others are listed in the future? Google’s PR post on this is predictably salty, citing “Many Europeans” being upset at it (and giving the example of a thread with 18 responses) ↩︎
  2. For comparison, mullvad only knows an account number and you can send them cash by mail to pay for things if you want. ↩︎
  3. I’m talking relative to the market here, not “is 10 USD a lot to me?”. Paid-for search engines are unheard of, with the only thing coming close being ChatGPT 4, which of course plays a very different league already. ↩︎
  4. For context, Microsoft made Internet Explorer riding the Dotcom bubble created by Netscape, eventually supplanting it with it’s patented Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy and ActiveX, and pushing what we now know as MSN, but which quickly bloated up to an everything internet portal where you could buy, sell, send emails (hotmail), and so on. And if Firefox, Chrome and an EU anti-trust case hadn’t happened, they might have been what Google is today.
    For Google, Android and Chrome were amazing strategic investments because it allowed them to be less reliant on third party browsers like aforementioned Internet Explorer. And even Firefox at one point switched to Yahoo! as the default search engine. Similarly, Apple, Samsung and other manufacturers could control the default search engines on their devices. Android and Chrome thus are Google’s power projection methods which they can use to strongarm device manufacturers to pre-install Google products, and to strongarm their users by slowly eroding the effectiveness of adblockers.
    For Kagi, this kind of world-conquering strategic plan doesn’t really make sense, and it’s publicly communicated that Kagi is supposed to be niche. ↩︎
  5. I’d even argue it’s interesting: The state of browsers at the moment is Chrome, Chrome with AI (MS Edge), Chrome with Crypto (Brave), Chrome with Gamers (Opera GX), Chrome with way too many features (Vivaldi), Mozilla management being seemingly incapable of making good decisions but still being the only non-Chrome alternative for many people (Firefox) and Apple (Safari) sitting in a corner doing not much of anything. Orion being “Safari but faster and also Chrome extensions” isn’t super interesting. ↩︎
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Published by Leo Wattenberg