As an experiment, I started a trial of Kagi, a homebrew search engine from Palo Alto, in October 2023. But I told myself, for me to really feel the effects of Kagi, to see if it has staying power, I had to make sure I could run Kagi searches everywhere. So I enabled the browser extensions on all my browsers. I changed all my searches so that they would redirect to Kagi, and I made sure even my mobile Safari searches all went through Kagi.

It wasn’t until I switched to Arc Search on my iPhone as my default this last two weeks that I realized how much I use Kagi and how dependent I have become on it for its incredible search quality. I didn’t even realize how much I accepted the mediocrity of Google’s search until I realized how much Kagi’s search engine just works for my line of thinking.

Five awesome features that just make sense:

• A recency filter: It’s so important to just search the latest posting of something
• Speed: It’s instant, ad-free, and works with a clean layout.
• Bang Commands: If I miss Google or am not confident I’ll get the result, I just append !g and it works!
• Fast, GPT-Powered Results too: If I want the power of GPT, I append !fast and I get it. And I can interact with those results and keep talking to it. I even get citations for my answers!
• Customize everything: They give me every switch I want so that I can make sure the search engine works for me.
  

One sucky part? Location and maps features need a huge upgrade. I can’t get proper, location-dependent results. Appending !g usually solves that problem but it’s such a minor inconvenience. Plus, I forgot to mention how they innovate on such a fast clip. It’s the details that add up to make everything so delightful.I’m positive their team is working on that location stuff and it’s just gonna get better.

Oh, and it turns out I search at least on average 893 times a month. Yeah, so I use my search engine a lot! $10/month for privacy-focused, tracking free search that works better than Google? For me, that’s totally worth it.