John Gruber wrote about Kagi again this week, which is a good excuse for me to update my own take.

I’ve been a paying subscriber for a couple of years now, and I have no plans to stop. My search results are better. They come from sources I actually trust. And I’m not being tracked, profiled, or served ads based on whatever I looked up yesterday.

The subscription is $10 a month. I don’t have a Starbucks habit, so I don’t find that hard to justify. Every search I do is one less transaction with an advertising machine. That’s worth something to me.

The knock on Kagi has always been that AI search will make dedicated search engines obsolete. I don’t think that’s right, at least not yet. AI gives me a synthesized answer. Kagi gives me a set of sources I can actually go read. Those are different things, and I still need both. For “what’s a good PDF editor for Mac?” I want a synthesis. For “what’s actually happening with Apple’s App Store case in Europe?” I want links to primary sources, not a summary.

Gruber notes that he occasionally uses Kagi’s Bangs feature (!) to fall back to Google. That’s the right way to use it. Kagi first. Google as a last resort.

If you haven’t tried it, the first 100 searches are free. You’ll probably notice the difference within the first ten.