I have been a Kagi user since its inception, I really liked the idea in 2021 and ever since they started charging money I have been on their $10 plan. It went through different stages, mostly when they had a monthly search quota you had to worry about. But this changed when they made the most common plan unlimited (then there is also the ultimate plan which I think was always unlimited).

Despite the plan changes, I really got used to it and I don't like alternatives. Before moving to Kagi as my main search engine, I had to use curtailed lists of sites to block on Google and DuckDuckGo because search on Google sucks. I use uBlock Origin (and Wipr on iOS) and there are lists that would block Google Search ads. But still, the quality was very bad and getting worse. It used to be much better.

As an academic and researcher (and one who hates Google), finding information is an essential part of my life. I usually spend much more time on this task than the average person. I was willing to pay that $120 per year for better results and improved privacy. But with time I don't feel that things are the same as before. There are reasons for that. Most of them are about me, not Kagi itself.

To begin with, I use AI, and it replaced some of my need for internet search (Stack Overflow replacement is a classical example). This is no surprise, copying a Python error or GCC complaints was always a big chunk of my search. Now I use whatever tools can help me with that (sometimes with better context). The other big chunk is abusing search engines as a spelling checker, how else do you expect me to remember to write "assessment" and put all those "s" letters in the correct positions while typing quickly and thinking about other things?

Another issue I face is that Kagi really sucks at two things that are annoying to me. Local results in general and specifically once you go outside US local areas. I moved from the US to Europe and this simply might be the main reason. But also Kagi is terrible in Arabic, and I mean really terrible. Yes it is niche to their user base but Kagi doesn't really respect my Arabic queries most of the time, half of them will be English semi-related results and the quality is not that great in general. It is even worse on the news section where it is basically useless to look into news results for Arabic queries. You will be greeted by 50% of results that are not in Arabic. Another 20-30% will be from a couple of years ago for simple generic searches like "مصر" (Egypt in Arabic). It will constantly remind you that 2015 was 11 years ago, not like you feel it was 3–4 years ago.

Furthermore, while Kagi relies on providing good results, sometimes their artificial limits on the number of searches render it useless if you really try to look deep into a topic. It feels like it is optimized to get you information about direct questions. But sometimes you want to do an in-depth exploration of what people say about something or old results. The obvious reason is that it costs them money to provide these searches (different index API including Google itself). They try to be smart and conservative which would work and be enough for the vast majority of users and cases. But this was always an annoying thing that I managed to work around by reverting to Google then my SearxNG instance (I customized sources to things I care about instead of the default lists or all-included approach).

With all that said, I don't feel that Kagi is worth it for me right now. I will miss Kagi, this month will be my last month, and I am preparing myself to move to use my SearxNG as my search engine. I will miss being asked when sharing a screen about what is this strange website with a dog logo that you use for search on Zoom meetings.

I am also aware that there are many complaints about the company focusing on AI (can we just call it LLM out of respect to other AI researchers?) and the Orion browser, but I really don't use both and don't have an opinion on that. I might have found it useful a couple of times that appending a question mark at the end of a query invokes their LLM integration (FastGPT) to get quick answers (I know how to close Vim and have muscle memory for shortcuts). And Orion doesn't support uBlock Origin so it does not improve things for me. I will stick to Safari on iOS at least for my battery health and of course, it is always Firefox on desktop.

However, I want to emphasize that the current limitations do not make Kagi a bad product in general. It is a valid experiment in a direction I support. It does not have to be the best or the worst to be valuable. It is simply not a fit for me at this moment.

I really wish Kagi good luck and I hope that they can survive long term, but my problem is niche in this niche market, so I will say farewell.