If anyone from Kagi is reading this: Now that you have search without an account, is there any chance we can finally get a DNS-based enforced safesearch option like every other major search engine has? It's been in the feedback requests since May 2022[1].
Anyone on an enforced-safesearch network can now go to kagi.com, turn SafeSearch off, and search for porn or anything else, which is just going to get kagi blocked completely on all those networks. If you add a SafeSearch-enforced alternative IP address, then Kagi can still be used.
Haven't tried Kagi yet. I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google. As a duckduckgo user honestly i typically find what i want, except I am feeling more and more like i don't recognize / trusts many of the top sites in a result. might be a perfect time to try it.
Very happy Kagi user for a few years.
I extra appreciate the ability for me to set custom rankings for certain sites. For example, I have downranked Reddit so it only shows up if there's almost nothing else. They're also a whole bunch of AI garbage sites or listicle sites that have outright removed from all my search results.
I also love that it doesn't try to AI summarize everything I search, it only does it when I put a question mark on there so I can turn it on and easily.
And I pay for my account and use it on all my devices without having to buy four licenses.
I love Kagi and have been a very happy subscriber for like a couple years now.
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
I used Kagi for a few years and was completely satisfied.
I switched to Ecosia because I want to support European alternatives, but that's all. I tried Qwant for a while, and for some reason it was frustrating me (I assume that the results were not satisfying for me?). I wonder if Qwant is better for search in French? Not sure. Ecosia hasn't been frustrating though, and I cannot say that it's worse than my experience with Kagi. I just wish I could pay Ecosia instead of having ads (which my browser seems to block anyway).
Anyway, I always wonder why it is that a search engine (say Kagi, Ecosia) can "work well" and another one (in my case Qwant) can be "frustrating". If they all tap into Google/Bing and others, I would expect similar quality? I'd be curious if someone could explain!
I'm a happy subscriber / user of Kagi, but I don't understand why their API usage is not _included_ within your plan.
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
I've been a Kagi subscriber for a while now, the only non-Kagi workflow I end up using frequently is !gm instead of using the Kagi maps. Hopefully that gap closes up in the future.
I'm a happy Kagi subscriber for 3 years? 4 years now? Not sure.
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
I'd love to use Kagi, if only there was a $5-7 plan with only search, no AI. There's a million other better AI providers/gateways/whatever at API prices, doesnt work for coding, and subscriptions are better value. For me it makes no sense.
Splendid news! I definitely think getting Kagi in front of people to try will be easier than requiring a sign up... Obviously it won't be for everyone, not everyone values the benefits of good search, but plenty would if only they saw it.
I do think it's good that you can now try it out without logging in, but using Cloudflare with aggressive fingerprinting does go a bit against the whole idea of data protection. If you're already being tracked as a trial user, why would you want to give them your payment information, which would only lead to even more tracking? I'm a Kagi user myself and enjoy using the add-on to take advantage of Privacy Passes. But now I have to assume that I'm still being tracked and that my searches are being linked to me.
I was surprised to find out Kagi and google results by default are very similar because Kagi uses google results, they have their own index too apparently but it's not used as much.
For some reason after latest MacOS update (27.2) Kagi extension for Safari started failing frequently. I have Kagi configured to redirect Google, but now I just see Google search show up and stay there. It only redirects if I click the Kagi extension button myself. Seems like a bug, but happens so often that it really ruins the experience.
Kagi users, please use Kagi Assistant for search, use custom assistant for even better result. It is the new "interface" for knowledge retrieval, with all your personalized search priority and blocked site included. Current GLM 5.3 Flash or GPT 6 Luna will get the job done.
I tried Kagi for a couple of months and then cancelled.
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
Kagi is playing a smart game. They will catch the search traffic that Google is abandoning. Similar to what happened to RSS when Google Reader was shut down - a few other players caught a good amount users.
Is there a search widget available for iOS? I tried installing the kagi for safari app, but apple’s intentionally scary warnings did it’s job and convinced me not to enable it. I'd rather just have a widget on my homescreen which opens results in a safari tab. I built one with shortcuts, but it’s ugly.
i tried Kagi against Duckduckgo, Google, Bing, Yandex. It turned out more complete, old-web results whereas all the rest merely returned duds (same search, something difficult to find).
Yandex also annoyed me by constantly wasting my time to have me prove i am human.
I was a subscriber for 2 years but as of late, I've had less and less need for Kagi's awesome search experience. Most of my querying can happen thru Gemini or Claude even if it's a bit slower but I don't have to pay $10/mo for something that is not worth $10 to me now.
I assume this is Apple’s issue moreso than Kagi’s. If anyone is reading this from the Safari team, setting Kagi as default search is far too difficult and the app workaround is unreliable.
I continue to pay for Kagi despite barely using it (Kagi doesn’t charge you if you don’t search in a given month! Fantastically consumer friendly feature) but this issue makes it useless on my mobile devices where I use search most.
Kagi is really good. And I never thought I would say this but their AI assistent actually works. It is well integrated with their search product to deliver actually usefully results.
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
Reading down the page, I didn't realize they had apps for AI and news and stuff. Pretty cool! It feels so much better to be using a service that is NOT supported by ads
I love Kagi. I especially appreciate how it pushes back against AI slop and makes the web feel more human again. I haven't looked back at Google since switching. The search results are consistently better.
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
Summary: paid search engine Kagi has released a limited-use free trial. Despite what the title and the bolded text implies, the search engine has not become consistently usable free of charge. After 50 searches, you need to create an account, and after 100 more searches, you need to pay for a subscription. There is no indication that you can ever use the service for free again after those 150 searches.
The “for everyone” is technically true, but practically meaningless. In the long term, the type of person who finds the subscription price too high to pay will still be unable to search with Kagi.
Sadly, Kagi uses a Cloudflare turnstile that's set to paranodial mode, so my Firefox on Linux is rejected. I suspect it's because the turnstile wants to use some WebGPU APIs to fingerprint my browser, and those APIs don't exist.
I certainly never thought about counting my searches. I don't have a feeling at all if 50 is a lot or not.
What I also don't understand is: so how does the counter work? If I register, I can search 100 times and then it's done? Do I move into the 5$ tier to continue and have "Enough searches to get you going", whatever that means? Because certainly it's not "Unlimited Kagi Search" since you have to pay 10$ for that.
The business model is what made me turn away right now. I don't like those kind of "funny things" around money I have to spend.
How is it at searching the less savory side of the web? Like if I want to find an open directory full of paranoid delusions and conspiracy theories am I going to get any results? If I want to find a site that streams bootleg 80s eastern european cartoons will I find it faster than if I search on yandex? If there's some news article about how a serial killer was leaking information to some obscure forum, will I be able to find his posts instead of dozens of copies of the same news story?
Still no option to pay on a per search basis? Still not remotely interested then. I don't search nearly enough to justify paying for a search engine subscription.
Surely I am not the only one that has basically stopped using web search almost completely? Wikipedia, YouTube search I still use sure, but almost anything I'd have searched Google for 5 years ago I just...plop into ChatGPT now. No outdated StackOverflow links, no Pinterest spam, no generic SEO slop. It seems Kagi has some AI stuff...but...why?
In terms of Diataxis [0], this is like optimizing for application over acquisition. I've been needing more acquisition lately, or honestly for my whole life, so I don't necessarily want something optimized only for application. Yet here we are, in a world that increasingly seems to be forgetting acquisition entirely.
I'd be happy for Kagi to have ads at the top of their search results but results to pages with no ads. A Google killer. but I'm never going to pay for search. Ever, there are to many alternatives.
I know Kagi is supposed to be a curated experience but I really, really wish they'd have a setting I could toggle to see more than 200 search results per query. 200 is just 2 pages and for more obscure search topics (like, "pyroelectric partcile acceleration") I found that Kagi could never "curate" and actually deliver the links to the research paper PDFs that other search engines could find. Even google with it's 400 maximum search results and Bing with 900 are more useful because of this. But it not like search engines used to be where you could dive deep into many hundreds or thousands of results and find serendipitous things related to the intended search. I really miss and would pay for the ability to read and select search results myself instead of having them curated for me by some algorithm. Or at least give me a couple thousand "curated" results.
Yes, sir(s)! Using a search engine without ads is such a life improvement that it’d be a steal at twice the price.
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.
Search for everyone
(kagi.com)740 points by elashri 5 November 2026 | 407 comments
Comments
Anyone on an enforced-safesearch network can now go to kagi.com, turn SafeSearch off, and search for porn or anything else, which is just going to get kagi blocked completely on all those networks. If you add a SafeSearch-enforced alternative IP address, then Kagi can still be used.
[1] https://kagifeedback.org/d/3285-safe-search-dns-locking-for-...
I understand that price also includes the AI stuff, but I’d rather use something like the ChatGPT app directly than go via Kagi for that.
Right now there’s $10 for unlimited search and AI stuff and $5 for limited search and AI stuff.
At what price point could Kagi offer unlimited search and no AI stuff?
There were a few times where I would search for things and get some very, very weird results (e.g., when looking for GH repos, I'd find things at the top from places like gitmemory (I think that's what it was called)) and I thought that was very odd, but it hasn't really happened again in a few days so I don't know if it was just a bug or what.
I switched to Ecosia because I want to support European alternatives, but that's all. I tried Qwant for a while, and for some reason it was frustrating me (I assume that the results were not satisfying for me?). I wonder if Qwant is better for search in French? Not sure. Ecosia hasn't been frustrating though, and I cannot say that it's worse than my experience with Kagi. I just wish I could pay Ecosia instead of having ads (which my browser seems to block anyway).
Anyway, I always wonder why it is that a search engine (say Kagi, Ecosia) can "work well" and another one (in my case Qwant) can be "frustrating". If they all tap into Google/Bing and others, I would expect similar quality? I'd be curious if someone could explain!
If my agents are running internet search for me; why should I pay extra? My usage of Kagi has diminished since the raise of agents, so it should compensate. Maybe simply adding a soft cap to prevent abuse, but that's a bit lame to have to pay twice.
I love the philosophy of just taking money from users and working on giving them what they want and having nobody else to answer to, and I think the results from that philosophy have been excellent. But my biggest (only) complaints are difficult to solve for a paid search engine that requires login.
First, sometimes I end up logged out. And maybe I've changed my password in the meantime and it's not saved on the machine I'm logged out on. It is supremely frustrating to search for something and be met with a login screen instead, and enraging if I can't immediately solve it by logging in.
I'm hopeful that I can actually just search logged out now if this happens, and log in after I'm done with what I was doing.
The second is the requirement to install a browser extension in order to search from the unified search/url bar. I really wish browser vendors -- or, well, Apple is the only one I care about -- would support it directly.
I think they don't want to support a search engine that requires an account. It would be cool if the 100 free searches is progress in this direction but I'm not sure if it will be.
I really liked the AI search, but it burns through credits too quickly. I have since switched to using Hermes, it's not quite as good yet, but it's a fraction of the cost.
I liked the idea of ad free, slop free search. There were some problems with that though, which were hard to push past. I really like being able to search for stores and local restaurants. Maps integrations were hit or miss, mostly miss. It was also weirdly slow for me, even to load the search page without a query.
Final point was their published and then unpublished support of Yandex. The CEO tried to argue some "search without borders" BS, but really they are taking your money that and sending some of it to a Russian company which is either directly or indirectly funding a pointless war. I took issue with that and remembered it every single time I opened the page. In particular it really didn't sit well with me that the response was flippant and then they took down their list of sources.
I've switched to DDG and have been happier, YMMV.
Yandex also annoyed me by constantly wasting my time to have me prove i am human.
I assume this is Apple’s issue moreso than Kagi’s. If anyone is reading this from the Safari team, setting Kagi as default search is far too difficult and the app workaround is unreliable.
I continue to pay for Kagi despite barely using it (Kagi doesn’t charge you if you don’t search in a given month! Fantastically consumer friendly feature) but this issue makes it useless on my mobile devices where I use search most.
That said I’ve had a hard time getting other people on board. Apparently many people are just numb to the enshittification of the web?
My favorite feature is Smallweb [0]. I've actually replaced doomscrolling with browsing random personal blogs and discovering interesting corners of the internet.
[0] https://kagi.com/smallweb/
The “for everyone” is technically true, but practically meaningless. In the long term, the type of person who finds the subscription price too high to pay will still be unable to search with Kagi.
What I also don't understand is: so how does the counter work? If I register, I can search 100 times and then it's done? Do I move into the 5$ tier to continue and have "Enough searches to get you going", whatever that means? Because certainly it's not "Unlimited Kagi Search" since you have to pay 10$ for that.
The business model is what made me turn away right now. I don't like those kind of "funny things" around money I have to spend.
And the UI is also cluttered with useless stuff I don't need.
I feel that we lost good search engines here.
difficult to buy with no trial
[0]: https://diataxis.fr/compass/
Imagine DuckDuckGo but with no ads and good results every time instead of 90% of the time… absolute game changer.
EDIT: put another way; if you think ads don’t work on you, you’re just not aware enough. Ads work on everyone —in the moment and otherwise- and search ads are the most effective ads in history.
That’s why Google is explicitly built around using their money printer to pay into a long list of “bets”, hoping to find the next money printer before people realize how insidious this one is.