Kagi: The $10/Month Search Engine That Might Actually Beat Google

After nearly two years of daily use, tech journalist David Pierce has concluded that Kagi — a paid, ad-free search engine charging $10 a month — is simply better than Google for most searches. Founded in 2018 by Vladamir Prelovac (who previously sold a startup to GoDaddy), Kagi launched as a consumer product roughly three years ago with a simple premise: when users pay for search, the incentives flip entirely. Every search costs Kagi money, so getting users accurate results quickly is good for the business, not a threat to ad revenue.

Kagi's results hold up because it doesn't just reskin Bing. It maintains its own quality-focused index while also pulling from Google, Bing, WolframAlpha, Wikipedia, and other providers — combining sources more thoughtfully than most competitors. The practical difference is stark: searching 'best headphones for running' on Google returns sponsored shopping carousels, multiple ads, and a cluttered mess of one-click answers, while Kagi returns 14 straight links to buying guides. The SEO spam that has colonized Google is largely absent from Kagi, whose index prioritizes quality over scale.

What separates Kagi beyond raw results is its depth of customization. Users can permanently block or boost specific domains in two clicks — and Kagi even publishes a public list of the most-blocked sites (Pinterest tops the list). 'Lenses' let users toggle between searching only personal blogs, only programming sites, only forums, or custom curated sets. One user built a personal news feed by creating a Lens limited to publications they already subscribe to. The default yellow-mustard design is adjustable, and users can even write custom CSS to restyle the interface entirely.

Kagi's privacy posture is meaningfully better than Google's: the company's policy states it doesn't store search queries or click data, though some third-party integrations do collect activity data. The $10 base tier includes a FastGPT chatbot and a Universal Summarizer for links. A $25-per-month premium tier adds access to a full AI Assistant powered by ChatGPT, Claude, and others. Pierce uses neither heavily — the appeal is the search itself.

Two genuine weaknesses remain: Google Maps is simply unbeatable for local search, and Google's massive index wins on extremely obscure queries like hunting down archived blog statistics or rare email addresses. But Pierce estimates those edge cases arise maybe once a month. For everything else, Kagi is enough — and after two years, it's Google that now feels cluttered, chaotic, and unfamiliar.