2 Years Ago I Decided to Pay for My Search Engine. I've Never Looked Back

6 points by moebius_ansa ↗ HN
A few years ago I took a big leap: I decided to pay for a search engine.

I had gotten tired of the constant ads, click bait content and tracking.

I missed the old days of the Web where you could find, largely accurate, quirky information from blogs, podcasts, etc.

The search engine I use is Kagi. It's clean, the team works really hard to surface high-quality links, my searches aren't tracked and studied and I genuinely enjoy the experience.

They've also integrated AI into search in really smart ways to augment the search engine, but it does not get in your way if you just want to find some information.

Paying for search is unusual, but I'm better for it.

5 comments

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Same. I'm super happy to pay for not-crap search results.
Ayep, Kagi is great and worth the subscription. Been using it for over a year now & I haven't used or miss Google at all, except at work (since they don't pay for Kagi).
I spent months trying to decide if I really was going to pay for search. Then I did it (about 2 years ago) and haven’t looked back since. Totally worth it.

It made me realize that one of the more troublesome things Google did was train us all to expect tech to be free. And then, by extension, trained us to accept shitty tech precisely because it was free.

You guys still search?
Personally I just sit in a dark hole and wish that I knew things