Save your sats. Search engines are (almost) useless in 2025. Most results lead to garbage websites filled with ads trackers and AI generated texts.
Discussion
I can tell you haven’t used Kagi lol. Check it out. You can filter based on the exact negatives you’ve mentioned.
+1
kagi is awesome
It requires users to be logged into an account to search. The last thing I would want is to have my search engine and LLM prompts tied to an online account, especially on a service like Kagi that has Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, Apple built-in.
Kagi claims they don't log anything, but their headquarters are in the USA, yeah...
Their browser is also only available on iOS/MacOS devices, and as far as I know, it's not even open-source.
Even if you ignore all the red flags, paying for a search engine doesn't make sense in today's world where every result is some random trash site with AI-generated junk with a billion ads. If Google can't fix that, how would Kagi?
I just use my local offline LLM to quickly get the answers i need, it's enough for most things.