A while back I tried out Kagi Search for a few months. It was a nice change of pace from Google, which is almost completely useless these days, and DuckDuckGo which is essentially privacy enhanced Bing.

Kagi actually pulls up relevant results and I don’t even need to use an ad blocker to protect myself from malicious ads mixed in with other advertising and the few search results that fill in the rest of the page. It’s a premium search engine so it doesn’t need to sell ad space to keep the lights on. They have a $5 plan that gives you 300 searches, or for $10 you get unlimited searches.

Honestly 300 is probably enough for most people. The first month or two I didn’t come close to surpassing that.

I used it for maybe six months without any complaints.

After a while, there was some drama surrounding the integration of Brave Software’s search engine and how Kagi’s CEO responded to some backlash from a few community members.

I absolutely despise Brendan Eich, CEO of Brave Software, because he’s a homophobic shit head whose views are so toxic he eventually had to step down as CEO of Mozilla a few years prior. Not to mention the crypto ponzi that’s directly baked into Brave Browser. I mean at the end of the day, Brave Software is a cryptocurrency-centric advertising company that also offers a web browser. It blocks all other ads and injects its own that are almost all pushing other shitcoin scams, and then it pays you a few cents worth of its own coin every month for viewing the ads. I’m not a big fan.

Before all of that, Eich literally created JavaScript.

But anyway.

As a member of the LGBTQ+ community, it kinda pissed me off. Kagi was already leaps and bounds ahead of any other search engine I’d used, why couldn’t they just leave well enough alone?

So I cancelled my subscription and went back to DuckDuckGo. I couldn’t handle that for very long, so I ended up back on Google. Then the AI stuff started blowing up and I fell in love with Perplexity. I don’t wanna go off on a whole tangent about Perplexity, so here are the Cliffs Notes: it’s a chatbot powered search engine that’s actually insanely accurate. It cites sources and even lets you select from a list of the top LLMs to power the research it does for you.

It’s incredibly useful. But using a multibillion parameter LLM that’s crippling power grids and wasting a bunch of water to look up shit like “will there be another season of the Connors?” seems like a waste. And on top of that, Perplexity is notorious for ignoring robots.txt and just taking what it wants from whoever it wants.

I’m not an AI doomer and I don’t want to fall into that same trap of boycotting a company because I don’t like its policies or whatever, but it just seems like a waste to me. Especially for $20 a month. It’s like exchanging healthy little bits of the environment for a few seconds of convenience. It has its applications, but I’d rather just use a search engine when I need to look something up. One that’s better than Google or Bing.

I didn’t give it much thought after quitting Kagi back then, but all things considered, I kicked it around in my head for a while and decided to give it another go.

Sure, Brave is a shitty company, but so is Google, Microsoft, Perplexity, Wal-Mart, Amazon, Nestle, and pretty much any other giant corporation. I’m typing this on an iPhone that was literally made in a sweatshop for fuck’s sake.

The web page you’re reading this on utilizes JavaScript. I guess I better remove that code because it’s tainted by Brendan Eich too.

If Eich was an actual partner or joined the Kagi team, it’d be a different story. But this isn’t that.

I’m just all outta angst I guess. There are bigger things to hate in the world. I don’t want to waste my time boycotting shit that ultimately isn’t any bigger an issue that anything else we face on a day to day basis. If I wanted to boycott everything that isn’t completely ethical, sustainably sources materials and labor, and only has pure and selfless intentions, I’d have to give up all of my material possessions and move into the wilderness.

This ended up being a lot more long-winded than I planned…

Conclusion: Kagi is a solid fucking search engine. It doesn’t rely only on Brave Search; it utilizes a basket of different search providers like Google, Bing and the rest of them to return the most accurate results it can come up with. It’s a small company that charges a reasonable price to give you ad free search. It’s a pioneer in that respect. I get a solid search provider for half of what I was paying for Perplexity.