Kagi vs Google search: a personal evaluation

Kagi is a relatively new search engine. Unlike Google, it makes money through user subscriptions and shows no ads. Despite having decreased my usage of web search since the release of ChatGPT, I still use it a lot, and would be willing to pay a few bucks a month for a significantly better experience. To evaluate Kagi, I put 75 of my recent search queries into Kagi and Google and rated which I preferred. The queries spanned various topics, heavily tilted towards software engineering and computer topics.

Summary

After this experiment I’ve decided to pay for Kagi and set it as my default search engine on both my phone and laptop.

Here’s a qualitative comparison and some thoughts:

Having worked at Google on search and seen how much human ingenuity and money went into building it, it’s pretty shocking that a 37 person (as of 2024-04) company can compete at all, but here we are!

Detailed results

Google big wins

Kagi big wins