The news: Kagi is positioning its search engine to rival Google with the proposition that you get what you pay for when looking for information online. The platform charges $10 per month and offers no ads, no data collection, and control over the types of results that are surfaced.
To enhance its pitch, Kagi recently added Privacy Pass, a feature that blocks search tokens from being traced back to users. “We have no incentive to track what an individual user is searching for. We are in the business of selling a search product, not selling user data or attention,” the company stated in a blog post.
AI, but with options: Kagi offers AI tools with extensive control over output. The search engine has its own version of Google’s AI Overviews, called Quick Answer, along with an interactive chatbot. Quick Answer can be toggled on or off, letting users decide if or when they want a summary of search results.