This Kagi?
Between the absolute blase attitude towards privacy, the 100% dedication to AI being the future of search, and the completely misguided use of the company’s limited funds, I honestly can’t see Kagi as something I could ever recommend to people.
Use of funds is misguided sure, but all the AI stuff is completely optional and has never ever gotten in my way
6 months to a year ago it was all people were recommending, Kagi and searxng. Maybe another paid one I forget the name. Now Kagi is bad?
That article is 2 years old. In the last two years Kagi hasn’t collapsed on itself, it’s not overrun with AI, the world hasn’t ended. They’ve implemented Privacy Pass, extended their browser support to Linux, introduced SlopStop for reporting AI websites, and generally continued to improve their main product.
Kagi is a business, run by people, who make decisions to the best of their ability based on their understanding of what’s going to best serve their needs/priorities.
Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views. That’s what it’s like trying to serve a broad market like “internet search users”. Some of those users are inevitably going to get fired up enough to write a 20,000 word opinion piece on the subject.
For any service, you have to choose if the value proposition makes sense for you and your needs. For me, the value of most free search services has gone down the drain, and the value of spending monthly for Kagi is better than having to think about/maintain a SearXNG instance. YMMV.
Like any other product, the owners are guaranteed to make decisions that are not aligned with a fraction of their prospective customers needs/views.
And the part where the CEO and the company pretends that data protection / privacy laws don’t apply to them? Can you overlook that?
IDK what the situation was like specifically two years ago, but now:
They have a whole section in their privacy policy on GDPR and CCPA etc, as well at clear instructions on how to use their service 100% anonymously leveraging TOR and Privacy Pass (+bitcoin and a burner email if you don’t want people even knowing you have a Kagi account)
https://kagi.com/privacy/rights
Seems weird to put in a whole Privacy Rights section about the privacy laws that apply to them if they don’t think privacy laws apply to them.
That’s good. Seems like they’ve added it just this year:
2026-02-17
Added Your Data Protection Rights covering GDPR, CCPA, and state privacy law data subject rights.
Sounds interesting. I currently pay the 5$/month for the Kagi search engine and that works great so I’m inclined to trust them on their other ventures.
Their ‘Research’ AI is pretty decent too. I can get to the same ends eventually, but I can’t read and digest 25 different pages and then launch another 10 follow-up searches in 15 seconds. It’s summarizing and not simply inferencing so the hallucination rate is acceptably low and it also cites the sources so you can click a footnote to fact-check any important details.
I self-host most things, but I can’t self host a search engine. I much prefer paying monthly than having to fight the eternal battle against tracking and ads.
You CAN self-host a search engine, look up searxng.
Yes it’s a metasearch engine, but so is Kagi for the most part, their own indexes don’t cover everything.
