I’ve been using Kagi Search for about six months now. I am on the lowest tier of the paid plans which allow me 300 searches a month. It turns out that that is quite enough for me. I have never hit that limit.

What I don’t know is if I need Kagi? Or perhaps to be more specific, if I should pay for search?

I do like Kagi. It generates its own results. I feel good from using a search service that is not keeping an eye on what I search for or where I am searching from. I have only dipped my toe into some of Kagi’s related search services.

Before Kagi I had been using DuckDuckGo for a number of years. DuckDuckGo is another privacy related search engine, probably the most popular. Its search results come from a number of search sources, including Bing, Wikipedia and Yahoo. DuckDuckGo does not save your IP address, although will save searches while not tying them to you,

we only save these anonymous search queries — completely disconnected from any unique identifiers like IP addresses — for just enough time to analyze anonymous trends like popular searches, so that we can better serve you.1

I cannot speak to the quality of the searches, Kagi vs DuckDuckGo. I have never searched the same term side by side in the two search engines - perhaps I should test that? However, I sense that the quality of my work, such is my need for search, will not be improved by one engine over the other.

I think that I will cancel my Kagi plan and return to DuckDuckGo. If I feel that DuckDuckGo is unusable, I’ll rethink this idea.

  1. duckduckgo.com/privacy ↩︎