How I Fell in Love with Kagi (Bart Busschots)

I’ve been advocating the follow the money philosophy for over a decade now — your data, and hence you privacy, are valuable, so you need to choose carefully who you entrust them to, and the best way to figure out who is and who isn’t trustworthy is to understand how they pay their bills. Once you understand how an app or a service keeps the lights on, you’ll understand their incentives, and then you need to choose apps and services from organisations who’s incentives align with yours.

I broke the big complex world of apps and services down into five archetypes:

1. Commercial — the user pays directly for the apps and services they use.
2. Genuinely Free — charitable foundations powering free apps and services like Wikipedia, and course, the entire open source ecosystem!
3. Freemium — for-profit apps that use basic free versions as a loss-leader for their high-end apps and services, with DropBox being an excellent example.
4. Free-for-Now — apps and service from for-profit companies that run losses year after year after year to grow grow grow so they can cash-in later somehow. Their defining feature is that they’re unsustainable — something will need to change in the future, or they’ll vanish. WhatsApp is a perfect example — it had no viable business model, but spent money hand-over-fist to grow their user base in the hope of pivoting later. They had hoped to pivot, but failed, and sold to what became Meta. They had great privacy terms, but those all evaporated!
5. FreePI — a word I coined as a contraction of Free-in-exchange-for-Personal-Information. This is your Google, your Meta, your X, etc.. You don’t pay with money, you pay with your privacy. If you do that knowingly and deliberately, cool, but most of their users are effectively conned into thinking they are getting something for nothing.

In terms of incentives, commercial is the most straightforward — I pay a company to provide me a service I want and their incentive is to keep me, the customer happy. If they have as a selling point data privacy, then they are incentivised to live up to that promise. This is why I’m an Apple customer — their incentives align with mine pretty darn well!

With charities it comes down to whether or not you agree with their aim, for WikiPedia I whole-heartedly do, so I’m both a user and donor.

I also have no problem with freemium apps and services who’s offerings align with my needs and wants — I happily used the free DropBox tier until I needed more, now I happily pay for their fancier features.

Free-for-Now is also a simple call for me — I just avoid them like the plague! They’ll either fail, or pivot. Maybe to freemium or commercial, but probably to FreePI. Either way, our data is just not safe with them!

What I’ve struggled to avoid is FreePI. I use WhatsApp because the cost to my privacy is an acceptable exchange for contact with my family. I used Twitter for years because as a podcaster, I just had to be there. And so on.

All in all, I succeeded pretty well in moving my digital life away from FreePI and Free-for-Now to truly free, commercial, and freemium alternatives:

• Apple & Linux for computing devices and OSes
• A corporate Office 365 subscription for email, contacts, calendars, much of my messaging, most of my cloud storage, and boring office work apps
• A family 1Password plan for securely managing secrets
• DropBox for additional cloud storage and collaboration
• Signal for most of my private messaging
• My own Mastodon server for my most valuable social media posts
• A paid Glass membership to host my photography

But, for a very very very long time, I felt trapped using Google for search because none of the alternatives proved viable 🙁 But notice my use of the past tense! I’ve not talked about it much because I wanted to be really sure I was not deluding myself, and that I wouldn’t just fall back on Google in a few months. But now that I’ve recently paid my third annual invoice, I feel confident saying I have found a truly excellent commercial search engine — Kagi!

My first encounter with Kagi was a long-form podcast interview with their CEO while the product was still in closed beta, and his vision for the product gelled so perfectly with my wishes, desires, and world-view that I made a mental note to keep an eye on them. I mostly forgot about them until they got a full-throated recommendation from notoriously picky tech columnist John Gruber. That jogged my memory of the podcast interview, and I signed up for one year as a single user. By the end of that year I had successfully used it for 100% of my mobile searching, and when the invoice landed for another year I decided it was time to go all-in and I upgrade to a family plan. I switched all my Macs and my iPad over to Kagi to join my iPhone where I’d been using it for a year. That family plan has now been renewed for a second year because in my full year of using Kagi for everything outside of work (I use exclusively the enterprise ad-free versions of Bing in work for many reasons), I never fell back to Google even once. The only time I saw a Google results page was when I first booted up my new MacBook Pro and forgot to install the Kagi plugin. I was horrified by the obnoxious ads and the utter uselessness of the search results!

Not only has Kagi gotten better and better, but Google has also gone to the dogs!

So what do I get with Kagi?

First and foremost, I get search results that have only one goal — to get me what I want. Not to send me to services owned by Kagi, they don’t have that kind of conflict of interest, and not distract or trick me with ads or paid results. Kagi’s only goal is to answer my questions as well as it can!

Secondly, I get to choose how the results are presented to me. I choose the layout of my search results page, the format of each result on that page, and the set of information cards that enrich the page. One of the best things Google ever added were those little Wikipedia cards to get you good information at a glance, and happily one of the cards Kagi offers is a WikiPedia card!

Thirdly, I get to tweak the algorithm! Remember, Kagi’s only incentive is to make me happy so I keep paying that renewal each year, so they have no reason to tilt my algorithm any way other than the way I want it tilted! So, next to each result is a little shield icon where I can tell Kagi never to show me a result from that site again, to down-rank the site, or, to boost the site in my rankings or even pin it to the top of my results page when a match is found from that site. Given what I do, stack overflow gets bumped for me, and news sources that have proven themselves untrustworthy to me never darken my results again!

Finally, Kagi have successfully worked around Safari’s annoyingly limited officially supported list of search providers with an excellent suite of plugins that use Apple’s content blocking APIs to redirect all Google searches to Kagi. So, when I type a random search into my address bar on my Macs, iPad, or iPhone, I get Kagi not Google results!

So, in short, Kagi gives me better results than Google, it lets me pay with money instead of my privacy, and it works great everywhere, even in Safari.

If you think it must cost Kagi a lot of money to deliver that service while opperating sustainably, you’d be correct. This is why they charge realistic prices. Our family plan comes in at $151.20 per year, or $12.60 per month. That seems like a lot, but remember, estimates are that Meta and Google generate about $10 to $20 per user per year by monetising their data. So, even if that Kagi bill were just for me it would already be valuable, but it’s not just for me, it’s for myself and the better half, so actually, it’s great value!