I enjoyed and appreciated this Ars Technica deep dive into Google alternatives. I've found myself using Google a lot less over the past 12 or 18 months, and my usage has fallen off the edge of a cliff since they started responding with AI summaries.
On an average workday, I’d probably make at least a dozen queries, sometimes a lot more. I'm not asking for anybody to spin up a massive research project. The stuff I need to know tends to be trivia, like: What brand of cigarettes did Franklin Roosevelt smoke?
But the problem these days is that you simply can't trust the results. Either the AI summaries hallucinate them into existence, or they are aggregating a bunch of bullshit from the increasing amounts of AI slop being ingested into their training models.
So this essay, which basically recommends that you pay to use Kagi as your search engine, hit all of my priors.
With Kagi, you pay for the product using money. That's it! You give them some money, and you get some service—great service, really, which I'm overall quite happy with and which I'll get to shortly. You don't have to look at any ads. You don't have to look at AI droppings. You don't have to give perpetual ownership of your mind-palace to a pile of optioned-out tech bros in sleeveless Patagonia vests while you are endlessly subjected to amateur AI Rorschach tests every time you search for "pierogis near me."
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I'd previously bounced off two trial runs with Kagi in 2023 and 2024 because the idea of paying for search just felt so alien. But that was before Google's AI enshittification rolled out in full force. Now, sitting in the middle of 2025 with the world burning down around me, a hundred bucks to kick Google to the curb and get better search results feels totally worth it. Your mileage may vary, of course.