Why I switched to a paid search engine
Google is just bad now.
Does anyone else just love when every tool they use, every piece of software becomes "AI-powered"? Don't you love when you get some ugly twinkle icon next to your note-taking app or your browser or something? It's the best.
Google has become a hellscape for ads and AI slop -- a corporate heaven where the same five sites are plastered in your face and the diversity of the web is hidden from you. It becomes a space that aligns completely with Amerikan mainstream viewpoints and quietly drowns out objectors. And above all else, it's buddy-buddy with Israel with R&D in the country and a great relationship; it's on the BDS boycott list.
So, with all that said, of course I've been continually thinking about moving to a different search engine! The only question is what.
Bing is tied to Microsoft which has the same problems. It's an ads-first search engine tied to Microsoft, Israel's best bud.
DuckDuckGo seems to be cleaner, but they also feel the need to plaster false AI summaries with your queries by default! The problem with DDG is that the results it gives are simply crap. What use is a search engine if I have to use another search engine to find what I'm looking for half the time?
There doesn't seem to be a clear answer... but I found Kagi a little while back.
Kagi is everything Google used to be. It's wicked fast, it's got the DuckDuckGo bangs system, it's customizable, powerful, and has comprehensive search filters.
What's the catch? You pay for it.
This to me is something I love and can absolutely get behind. Why? Because such a transparent business model prevents enshittification. You wanna know why so many privacy-respecting tools and platforms fail? Because they have no consistent source of income or rely on some ontologically evil company to fund them. They have to squeeze in ads in an "ethical" way or make deals with the devil. Kagi just takes your money every month.
The default experience is clean and focused. It's just the results you want, without the noise. There's no AI crap by default, but if you really want it, you can suffix your query with a question mark and get a GPT prompt for it. The layout is simple, it's boring, and it does its job. And I think this alone makes it worth the price. If you want to restore your sanity on the web, give it a shot!
Comment below if you have any thoughts.