This has also been my experience. The search quality is no better. When I ask people directly what they like about Kagi, it's all about the customization stuff (custom search operators; denylisting domains; etc). I do see the appeal of that, but I don't personally care enough about those features to pay for it.
You also get Kagi assistant which is nice
Part of the problem is that Google has been actively sabotaging google-fu for quite some time now. E.g. ignoring quoting in queries.
Agreed. It is a major annoyance and the primary reason I was exploring other options. However, even though it is infuriating when google refuses to not respect my query, the number of such queries for me are limited and thus I can use Kagi(and lately exploring search in ChatGPT). The amount of such searches I have needed haven't exceeded 100 on Kagi so I haven't had the need to resubscribe yet but if they do I guess I will maintain the subscription. However with the response time issue I doubt I would ever want it to be my primary search provider.
This is so infuriating that it single-handedly made me start looking for alternatives.
There is a noticeable friction now in using Google for searching. A pretty good example of how a decent product gets ruined by accountants and shareholder demand.
What is the value of low latency when the first page results are garbage?
GP literally said in their first sentence that results quality wasn't improved with Kagi.
I tend to agree. I would pay money solely for the features that let you block sites, uprank and downrank sites, but use Google instead. Bonus points if they block the Gemini stuff.
User scripts and browser extensions to the rescue, at no cost but time invested in setting them up.
I have had a similar experience. After using Kagi, I don't really get why someone would pay for what they are offering today.
Daily user for a few years now, the response times have not gotten that much better, but I do like the assistant feature of their higher tiers so I've stayed on for now.
Assistant was surprisingly useful. In a couple of occasions I had it find me research papers I didn't know existed for a problem I had been working on for long.
However the realization for me was that I shouldn't neglect search abilities of the LLMs I was already paying for. I tried to replace my Claude and ChatGPT subscriptions with Assistant but the usage limits were too low for me. And for the cases where I wanted to use long context of Gemini models, the assistant had an arbitrary limit of only 32k I think.
However for those where it can work, I think Kagi Ultimate is a great deal.
The assistant recently was made available to all tiers, with only the more expensive models being limited to the higher tier.
Same
I would love to pay for search again and not be the product but as of my last experiment(Nov 2024) Kagi wasn't that for me. Curious to know if anyone else had such an experience or perhaps something I need to re-evaluate.