I want to like Kagi but their pricing structure is crazy overpriced imo. If it was $5 a month for unlimited searches maybe, but their offerings don't come anywhere near GPT-4 in terms of value in my experience.
You use a lot less than you think. I pay $10/mo for 1000 searches and I typically use about 300-400
Besides that, it's worth it to me to get the results I'm after instead of SEO spam. Plus Boolean and literal operators that actually work and the ability to permanently block Pinterest, Facebook, and other cancerous sites.
With how useless Google search and even DuckDuckGo have been for me recently (quotes not working, minus not working, silently ignoring words in the search query, etc) I've started using kagi and perplexity.ai and been really happy with the results. Most of my web searches are for work, and paying a few dollars that can save me hours is worth it.
Maybe the big search companies are optimizing correctly for their business, but they are definitely not optimizing for my use cases.
I'd be curious to see actual benchmarks of Kagi against DuckDuckGo and the Searx alternatives.
I've heard good things about Kagi, but I've been happy with DuckDuckGo for a long time. I'm not going to spend a lot of effort into considering to switch to Kagi unless someone can show me that it is measurably better and faster than DuckDuckGo, and is worth the price.
Besides that, it's worth it to me to get the results I'm after instead of SEO spam. Plus Boolean and literal operators that actually work and the ability to permanently block Pinterest, Facebook, and other cancerous sites.