I was highly skeptical (and especially didn't like the nature of having a limited number of searches per month), but decided to try it for a few days.

I'm blown away. They really are that good

I'm a paying customer since June 2022, and I was wondering if I was the only one using its most powerful feature: domains personalizations. I guess not: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard&k=2

When you start searching a lot for professional reasons (e.g. rust the language vs rust the game), Kagi's value is a no-brainer.

I work at Kagi. I'm as blown away by the recent coverage as you are. We're a 15ish people company, which is staying away from VC money and only raised a relatively small amount of money directly from our users. We don't have the time nor the money to spend on astroturfing. We do have an incredibly supportive community, and I'm sure they help in spreading the word. I think it also help that we have a good product :)

In fact, we even axed our referral bonus program a couple months back to ensure that no third party had anything to gain in promoting Kagi. Recently, that included saying "no" to an independent journalist who explicitly asked for referral bonus for their readers. All you see is organic.

Heya. I just want to let you know that y’all have something extremely special going on over there at Kagi. I honestly have no idea how your universal summarizer or your !expert work — not enough to implement it, anyway, beyond more than a cheap knockoff — and I’ve been in ML for a while now, so it’s genuinely thrilling to see something that even to jaded ol’ me looks like magic. Congrats and keep up the good work. I look forward to reselling your API!! Thank you!!

I suspect people just use it instead of adblock. I'm getting a strong Brave browser user vibe from these recurrent waves of Kagi users.

I had similar thoughts about a year ago. My experience is that the results are that good, though sometimes there are changes under the hood which lead to poor or limited results- it is a beta project, after all. I used the free trial, following which I stayed on the monthly sub before paying a lump sum of $100 for the next 10 months. I've enjoyed my correspondence with the CEO as well. YMMV

Kagi basically just uses google search api, then does some filtering/reranking on top. (They claim to have their own index, but I've never seen it used. I've had better results using Yandex for things that i know exist but google refuses to show). I bet a large part of the perceived quality boost is just from filtering the spammy so-clones, and downranking clickbait sites. But if you're frequently searching for things that google refuses to show (either due to bias, or because they just dropped it from their index) then Kagi won't help much, just use Yandex instead.