What is Kagi?
Kagi (kagi.com) is a paid search engine website with no ads for searching the web, that has its own index.
Notable Features
Ad-free: unlike most search engine websites, Kagi is not free to use. You have to pay to search on it. As of writing, there are several plans available: $5 per month for 300 searches, and $10 per month for unlimited searches, there's also a family plan, and even a trial, through which you can try 100 searches for free. Thanks to this monetization model, Kagi doesn't have ads or sponsored results. It's fully funded by money from its users, and so its users are its customers (if you aren't paying for it, you are the product!). This fact also addresses many privacy concerns that people have about search engines.
Web-search: Kagi has its own crawler and index, which it uses to index webpages, websites, and images on the web. Advanced options and filters include: choosing the order of the results to sort by Most relevant first, Least relevant first, by Recency, by Website, and Ad/Tracker Count; filtering by time: Past 24 hours, Past Week, Past Month, Past Year, and even more specifically by specifying the From Date and To Date; and being to enable or disable Personalized and Verbatim search.
Customizable ranking: one of Kagi's unique features is that you can customize which websites appear higher in your results, and which websites should never appear at all. This feature is called Lens, and you have 5 options: Block, Lower, Normal, Raise, and Pin, with normal being the default. As usual, most people use this to block Pinterest: not only is Pinterest.com the most blocked domain, but Pinterest.co.uk is the second most blocked, and, in fact, Pinterest is the entire top 7 of blocked domains1. Yeah, Kagi caters to the avid Googler fantasy of blocking Pinterest from the search results. Brave Search appears to have something similar, called Goggles2 (a popular goggle also being one that blocks Pinterest, by the way), but since you don't have an account on Brave, you don't create your own personal ranking, you simply create a goggle that you share with the entire Brave Search community.
Search suggestions/autocomplete: Kagi shows a list of queries that try to guess what you're trying to type as you type it in the search box.
Region switcher: Kagi will search for results relevant to your country by default, but you can switch to another country easily.
Image search: Kagi indexes images on the web as well, and so it provides an image search feature on its own tab. Advanced options and filters include: changing the order of the results to sort by Most relevant first, Least relevant first, by Size of the image, Recency, or by Website; specifying the size of the image, including the minimum width and height and the maximum width and height that you're looking for; picking the color of the image (e.g. red, yellow), including transparent and black and white; choosing the license of the image: Any, Public, Share, Share (commercial), Modify, and Modify (commercial); choosing the type of the image: Gif, Clipart, Line, Face, Photo, Shopping; choosing the aspect: Square, Tall, Wide; and the time of the image: Past Day, Past Week, Past Month, Past Year; and there's also three buttons at the left of the toolbar that read Latest, GIF, and HD, which apply quick filters to the results.
Video search: Kagi indexes videos on the web, too, providing a video search feature on its own tab. Advanced options and filters include: changing the order of the results to sort by Most relevant first, Least relevant first, by Recency, by number of Views, by the Duration of the video, or by Website; filtering by length of the video, although only three categories available: Short (<5 min), Medium (<20 min), Long (20+ min); filtering by video resolution, only two options: Standard and HD; and there's also a drop down in the toolbar to select the source of the video, the options being: Youtube, Vimeo, TED, Twitch, and Daily Motion.
News search: Kagi has a separate tab for news articles, in which every result has its date of publication. In this tab, there are two advanced options: picking the region (country) for the results, and picking the time: Day, Week, or Month.
Podcast search: Kagi has a separate tab for searching podcasts.
Indie web discovery: Kagi provides a free service it calls Kagi Small Web where you can check random small websites. It's available at kagi.com/smallweb.
Observations
Reverse image search: Kagi provides a reverse image search function. You can't drag and drop an image anywhere on the page, however. You have to click on a faint camera icon on the search box to make a panel appear where you can drag and drop an image, or you can type the URL of the image in the box. As usual, it's also possible to click on this URL box and press Ctrl+V to paste an image from the clipboard. This feature doesn't seem to be very polished yet, as there is no indicator that an image is uploading when you upload it. Also, it doesn't seem to be working at all. I searched for images of Christ the Redeemer, and downloaded the first result, which comes from Wikipedia. Then I tried reverse-searching for it. No results. I tried it with a game screenshot of Hammerfight, that Yandex was able to even correctly guess the name of, also no results on Kagi. I tried it with an image of the Statue of Liberty: no results. At this point I feel like I'm burning through my trial just to find an image that Kagi has indexed. It's worth noting that there are several ways to implement reverse image search. The simplest and most useless way would be to simply take an image file, create a hash of its data, and then you have to upload exactly the same file or a file that produces exactly the same hash to find it. This isn't very useful since opening an image and saving it again in a lossy format like JPG would change its hash. Resizing the image would change its hash. Flipping the image would change its hash. And so on. So normally you expect the algorithm to be based on the colors of the pixels, which is infinitely more complex and error-prone. If I upload an image that's mainly blue, I'd expect the reverse image search engine to just show me a bunch of random images that are mainly blue. It's only recently that search engines started employing even more complex algorithms to identify what the image is about rather than just matching the colors. So it's very surprising that no matter what I upload Kagi has no results. A blog post from May 2023 shows the reverse image search working with a photo of a blue car3, so, naturally, I Kagi'd for "ferrari" and downloaded the first image of a red car I could find to try the reverse image search, and, again, no results. Just a cartoon of a dog sitting looking at the text "We haven't found anything. There are no results for the given query. Try a different image." It's possible this feature doesn't work at all, the index is still too small even after one year deployed, it's temporarily down and I'm just unlucky, or its usage is restricted to trial accounts like mine (which would be strange since on sign up it said I'd be able to use all features of a paid plan during the trial).
References
- https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard (accessed 2024-04-30)
Kagi provides a "leaderboard" that has the most blocked, lowered, raised, and pinned websites.
↩︎ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31842675 (accessed 2024-04-30)
"Disclaimer: Works at Brave [...] Goggles can be used for personal preferences exclusively, but that's not the use case we had in mind." ↩︎ - https://blog.kagi.com/search-enhancements (accessed 2024-04-30) ↩︎
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