Kagi Lets You Search the Internet Without Ads (but It Will Cost You)
Reading Time: 4 minutesIs the promise of high-quality search results and no ads enough to make you pay for a search engine?
When you think searching the internet, you undoubtedly think of Google (unless you’re the one person who thinks first of Bing). The search giant is ubiquitous because it’s fast, free, and better at what it does than most of its competitors. But not everything about Google is amazing. While it’s technically free to use, you’re paying for the service with your privacy.
Google monitors your search history to show you more relevant ads, and over time, it builds a profile on you. This means that you’re likely to get trapped in your own search bubble, as Google keeps showing you the types of results that you’re more likely to click on. If you’re looking for diverse perspectives or to expand your horizons, there’s a chance that over time, you won’t find these easily via Google.
Google’s dominance has also created another problem: Thousands of websites exist only to create spammy content that targets Google search keywords. As a result, for many search terms, you’re likely to find low-quality, possibly AI-generated articles that have all the right search terms but don’t say anything you don’t already know.
This is why there’s a strong case for a competitor that values your privacy and is able to highlight results that Google won’t necessarily be able to surface. There are certainly privacy focused search engines such as DuckDuckGo, which does not track you and has an ad-supported model that doesn’t violate your privacy.
However, if you are totally opposed to the idea of ads and wouldn’t mind paying for a search engine that does not track you, you might want to check out Kagi Search. It’s from the developers of the Orion Browser, which lets you run both Chrome and Firefox extensions. The search engine offers a host of features—and an ad-free experience—in exchange for a monthly subscription fee.
What makes Kagi different from Google
Kagi offers quite a few interesting features that make it stand out. The complete lack of ads and sponsored search results is a big one—it definitely keeps your searches free of unrelated clutter. If you don’t like seeing search results from certain websites, Kagi allows you to block entire domains from your results, which is great if you want to hide conspiracy theory sites or those that have a lot of AI-generated spam. You can add up to 1,000 blocked domains in bulk via one of Kagi’s settings pages. If blocking results isn’t appealing, you can manually reorder search results to deprioritize sites you don’t want.
Kagi’s best feature might be Lenses, which allows you to look for results from corners of the web that would otherwise be inaccessible. For example, if you want to see results from smaller blogs and niche sites, you can enable the Small Web Lens in Kagi settings. This will push those niche results higher up. You can also create custom Lenses to highlight results from your favorite websites, so Kagi will find what you need from high-quality sites that you trust.
The search engine also does some other interesting things, such as grouping listicles together to reduce how much space they occupy on the results page. It has a filter that lets you deprioritize results from sites that have too many ads and trackers, and will sometimes surface unique, in-depth articles under a label called Interesting Finds. All these features work quite well in practice.
Kagi is fast, so you definitely won’t be waiting for ages to see results, and it’s highly customizable. You are given a lot of control over not only the results you see, but Kagi’s appearance. It also allows keyboard shortcuts and bangs (such as !r to search Reddit).
What Kagi will cost you
All these features come at a cost. Kagi does offer a free tier that allows you to conduct up to 100 searches; when you run out, you can pay $5/month for up to 300 searches or $10/month for unlimited searches.
This model also creates the biggest caveat: To use Kagi, you’ll need to create an account. This means that although Kagi is private (it doesn’t even save your search history), it is not totally anonymous. The company says it needs the account only to track the number of searches you’ve made and handle billing, and that it otherwise has no interest in preserving any of your data. If you are privacy focused and want to reduce the amount of information you are giving Kagi, you can create an account using an anonymous email service and pay using Bitcoin. The company’s FAQ pages are full of privacy related questions, and you should give it a read before you sign up.
Will anyone actually pay to search?
While these features might be appealing, you have to wonder: After decades of searching the internet for free, is there really a market for a paid search product? Kagi’s approach aims to create something that will appeal to a small group of people who value quality search results over anything else—a philosophy reflected in the fact that Kagi often generates relatively few (often less than 100) results that are likely more useful than what you’ll find on page four of your Google results. If the product works for you, $5/month isn’t a bad price at all. The free trial is also generous enough for you to make an informed decision—even if you search a lot, it’ll take you some time to use up those 100 searches.
How to try Kagi
To give Kagi a fair shot, you can either install the Orion browser, (which sets Kagi as the default search engine), or add the browser extension that lets you use it as your primary search engine. Unfortunately, it’s a bit tricky to use it as your default search engine on mobile devices, which is the biggest barrier to switching fully to Kagi. But if you take a few minutes to set a Kagi search page as your default home page, you may use it more.
Reference: https://lifehacker.com/kagi-paid-search-engine-review-1850936944
Ref: lifehacker
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG