It depends on what you want. I use Kagi but I have not sold it on my friends and family because for most of them, it doesn’t really make sense.
I’ve found it to be the best search engine, but I also think DuckDuckGo is generally fine. The $5/month plan with 300 searches per month is too limiting, IMO. I feel like anyone who searches that lightly will struggle to justify paying for Kagi over using DDG. For unlimited searches you need to step up to the $10/month plan.
When I started using Kagi, I did the free trial and every time I did a search, I’d do it in both Kagi and Google or DDG. It quickly became clear to me that Kagi was better, but I suspect this will vary a lot by your field, your tastes, and your personal search style. I mean, maybe there’s someone out there who actually wants to look at Pinterest results. I guess?!
If you ever considered paying for ChatGPT Pro or Claude Pro ($20/month), then Kagi’s Ultimate plan ($25/month) is probably a better value. It includes unlimited search, plus access to all the major premium models. On the other hand, ChatGPT Pro gives you access to image generation too, if you care about that.
Kagi’s research agent is legitimately great. It is nothing like the bullshit generator Google has. It will take a prompt, then run multiple web searches to get relevant info, recursively if needed, and then give a meaningful response with citations. It shows you the exact search queries it uses, along with the results it pulls from. I’ve used it to find accurate answers to problems that I realistically could not have found with traditional search engines; in one case the actual answer was something like 18 results deep in the 5th search it performed. I think most people would give up before digging that deep in search results.
This is what AI is good for: automating gruntwork. Not doing things I couldn’t do myself, but doing things I don’t fucking want to do myself because they are tedious and frustrating. 99% of AI applications are pure garbage. Kagi’s is part of the other 1%.
Could not have said it better myself. After my trial ended, I realized I was just going to pony up for it. It has probably saved me so much time when I’m doing my own little rabbit hole shenanigans at 2 in the morning when I should have been sleeping 4 hours ago.
I’ve been on the $5 a month plan, and go over probably half the time. The months when I do go over, it just means I start the next month a couple of days early. I’m probably actually somewhere around $6 a calendar month; my Kagi month is probably only 28 days or so.
It will take a prompt, then run multiple web searches to get relevant info, recursively if needed, and then give a meaningful response with citations.
Do you have an example of this you can provide verbatim?
I’m just curious; I think the one application LLMs might actually be viable for is exactly this kind of connection finding in a large corpus, and since I’m doing lots of research, I might actually find personal utility.
It depends on what you want. I use Kagi but I have not sold it on my friends and family because for most of them, it doesn’t really make sense.
I’ve found it to be the best search engine, but I also think DuckDuckGo is generally fine. The $5/month plan with 300 searches per month is too limiting, IMO. I feel like anyone who searches that lightly will struggle to justify paying for Kagi over using DDG. For unlimited searches you need to step up to the $10/month plan.
When I started using Kagi, I did the free trial and every time I did a search, I’d do it in both Kagi and Google or DDG. It quickly became clear to me that Kagi was better, but I suspect this will vary a lot by your field, your tastes, and your personal search style. I mean, maybe there’s someone out there who actually wants to look at Pinterest results. I guess?!
If you ever considered paying for ChatGPT Pro or Claude Pro ($20/month), then Kagi’s Ultimate plan ($25/month) is probably a better value. It includes unlimited search, plus access to all the major premium models. On the other hand, ChatGPT Pro gives you access to image generation too, if you care about that.
Kagi’s research agent is legitimately great. It is nothing like the bullshit generator Google has. It will take a prompt, then run multiple web searches to get relevant info, recursively if needed, and then give a meaningful response with citations. It shows you the exact search queries it uses, along with the results it pulls from. I’ve used it to find accurate answers to problems that I realistically could not have found with traditional search engines; in one case the actual answer was something like 18 results deep in the 5th search it performed. I think most people would give up before digging that deep in search results.
This is what AI is good for: automating gruntwork. Not doing things I couldn’t do myself, but doing things I don’t fucking want to do myself because they are tedious and frustrating. 99% of AI applications are pure garbage. Kagi’s is part of the other 1%.
Could not have said it better myself. After my trial ended, I realized I was just going to pony up for it. It has probably saved me so much time when I’m doing my own little rabbit hole shenanigans at 2 in the morning when I should have been sleeping 4 hours ago.
I’ve been on the $5 a month plan, and go over probably half the time. The months when I do go over, it just means I start the next month a couple of days early. I’m probably actually somewhere around $6 a calendar month; my Kagi month is probably only 28 days or so.
Do you have an example of this you can provide verbatim?
I’m just curious; I think the one application LLMs might actually be viable for is exactly this kind of connection finding in a large corpus, and since I’m doing lots of research, I might actually find personal utility.
DuckDuckGo pro is $10 a mo but you get advanced model, on top of vpn and other crap.