notes info 24·09·25

Like many people, I’ve been deeply peeved by the fact thatthe internet is bad now. While DuckDuckGo or StartPage are vastly better than Google at this point, I’ve still been on the hunt for something that really consolidates the good results while allowing more fine-tuned surfing.

I’m up here on my soap box to gush to you about Kagi, a paid, ad-free, privacy-based search engine with a mere 50k users at the moment despite the fact that it provides the most useful and productive search experience I’ve had since, idk, 2018. Kagi allows you to block, deprioritize, prioritize, or “pin” websites to make your searches more relevant. Pinning is especially neat: it means I can pin Bookshop.org, and anytime I search for a book, that will be my top result. I can prioritize reddit and deprioritize Pinterest. I can pin my favorite recipe websites so I’m not wading through AI cooking blogs. You can auto-filter out AI images. There’s a “small web” feature that allows you to query small, hidden gem websites. They’ll intentionally pull interesting articles or older articles you wouldn’t otherwise find. You can search PDFs only, or forums only, or academic sites only. Their AI features are opt-in only. My subscription money goes to things like providing Kagi free to public libraries. Have I adequately conveyed my enthusiasm yet?

If I search “Star Trek” on Google, I get AI “people also asked” questions I didn’t want, an AI overview unhelpful to me as I’m already a fan, and corporate websites. No fan websites or small web sites in the first two pages. If I search “star trek” on Kagi, it gives me the official site, a few recent news stories, a Wikipedia page, one new trailer, a quick bullet points collection of “interesting finds” that includes a link to this collection of all commercially available chairs in Star Trek, and a collection of articles specifically pulled because they were published many years ago. Multiple small web sites come next, then some game sites, and a hackaday project for making a DIY communicator. Publication dates, when available, are highlighted right by the URL.

Anyway, well worth $5 a month from me, especially since their pricing is so transparent and they’re entirely user funded. They also do zero advertising, which is part of the reason I made this long post. The five bucks a month is genuinely so worth it to me. Maybe it’ll be worth it for you, too. You can search 100 queries for free, but I also highly recommend their random small web link, which is like StumbleUpon but for small web sites. (It’s free.)

Kagi has a super generous free trial - I don’t know how it works in Hebrew or how it compares to what y’all currently use. Try it and can find out!

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