Today I will talk about Kagi a new search engine that I have been using throughout some of its development but keep in mind things are subject to change with this search engine because it currently only in beta in is in heavy development.
Search Results
So why don't we start with one of the most important things when it comes to search engines above privacy for some people is results. So results are important and Kagi say they take results from Google and Bing as well as using their own crawlers which are also implemented in some experimental search engines and links to those experimental search engines are linked at the end of this post but according to their search page they get search data from Apple, Google, Microsoft, Yelp, Wikipedia and others. I will not be doing side by side comparisons with other search engines in this post, when it comes to results, one because that would be a separate video in itself and two the search engine crawler is always being improved and a comparison like that might not be valid in a couple months down the road.
Features
Digs and Blast From The Past
When it comes to features Kagi has a feature called Digs which are meant to be interesting finds for the entered search term which they wouldn't usually put in their results but instead they put Digs as a widget on the search page and on a similar note Kagi also has a thing called Blast from the Past which is also a widget and it basically (according to what I know) gets relevant old results from the internet wayback machine based on your search query and puts them all into a widget as well. This means you can look at some old deleted pages and find if they have relevant info which is cool.
Instant Answers
It also has instant answers which is helpful and standard on most search engines but this search engine has decent ones and many privacy-focused search engines don't have that so props to them for that
Browser History Privacy Mode
Kagi also has a setting that allows you to mask your search's in your web browsers history called Browser History Privacy Mode which is pretty neat.
Lenses
Another feature is the fact it has a thing called lenses which lets users filter results based on certain parameters and make their own lenses which I will talk about later. When it comes to the lenses that are default there is a discussions lenses which lets you search forums and to a similar point there is a programming lens that only shows results from programming forums and sites. There is a PDF lens that only shows PDFs, as well as an EDU filter that only shows EDU sites. Another interesting lens is the News 360 lens which gives you news from trusted sources although I am not sure how they work what is trusted or not. Another cool feature is the ability to make custom lenses which allow you to filter results based on their domain name so you either only shows results from a certain domain name or exclude results from a certain domain name, only show results which are of a certain file type, you can make your lens only include results with certain keywords, before or after certain dates. You can also make your lenses only show results from the yesterday and today and with your lenses you can give them a name and a description. When you make or select a lens in settings and make sure it is in the active lenses column and if it is when you go to search something there should be a bar at the side with all of the names of your lenses, you can select one from there to filter your results.
Buisness Model
According to the CEO, Kagi will have a premium model when it launches so instead of relying on ads it will charge users a monthly fee which I think is an interesting idea but I am unsure how many people people are willing to pay for a search engine espcially with the pandemic and people being on tight budget.
Conclusion
Overall I feel like Kagi is an interesting search engine that does seem to take privacy seriously with no ads or tracking however I am unsure how many people are willing to pay for a search engine but I believe the market exists. I am also not a fan of the fact that they are based in the US because of it not very good privacy laws however if you are ok with that and paying for a search engine I would say when this launchs it will be the best search engine out there.