I never saw anything related to Kagi until I joined here, so good job lemmings (I'm not a user of such service though, but definitely would consider it).
At work, as an engineer, I have been able to find answers to obscure problems very quickly and easily via Kagi. To me that is easily worth spending $10 a month, rather than spending hours digging through junk on Google or DDG to find what I’m looking for (or never find it in some cases).
I also find being able to so easily adjust the priority of results to be awesome. For example, some sites like amazon, Home Depot, and Audible, I want the canadian sites always over the american ones. So i can lower the priority of .com and raise .ca with two clicks.
That's how I justify it, if it saves me time at work then that's worth money to me. $10 a month isn't that much, and since I've been trying to reduce my reliance on Google it's even easier to justify the cost. I've been a customer for a few months now and have been really happy with it so far, it's a better experience than Google search.
Sign up for the trial and see. I was really worried that I'd blast through the base sunscription's number of monthly searches, so I started counting the number of DDG searches I did a month. It was barely within Kagi's, so I signed up. The awesome thing is that their results are better to the point that I use fewer queries now.
It's so much better than anything free. And most free things you pay in other ways (ads, they sell your information, etc.)
I used duckduckgo for years but often had to go back to Google for things. It was never really good. As Google became worse and worse, I really felt like it was hard to find some things no matter.
I've used Kagi for a couple of months now and it's so fucking good, it also has some awesome features no other search engine has, like having full control over how high up specific websites show in results.
It costs resources to run a search engine. If the search engine you're using is great and free, either someone else is paying for it, or it's funded by debt, which means it will get enshitified over time to repay it. If someone else is paying for it and the service is sustainable, you're good. If not, then it's inevitably going to turn to shit. If you're okay with chasing the latest service that's not enshitified yet, then you're fine, so long as new options keep showing up. If you're not okay with that, or the options dry up, you might want to consider paying for one that will remain great over the long term. If there's a lesson I've learned from the Reddit fiasco last year and the general enshitification trend, it's that good services cost money and I should pay for the ones I appreciate and can afford. Lemmy is one such service. Kagi is another even if I prefer it were open source and community run.
They just added the homophobic (or at least the CEO) Brave browser's search engine as a source and I don't know whether to feel unhappy. I'm paying a bit to Brave monthly, but then again I was paying API fees to Google too.
There is no ethical consumption in capitalism. The best you can do is try and make sure your primary contact points with the system are good but once you get more than a step or two into the food chain there will always be dirt.
Especially if you're going to the level of personal beliefs of executives. I guarantee you gave more money to a dozen people way worse than him before lunch today than he'll make in a year off your Kagi searches.