All Kagi Search users can now flag low-quality AI content (“AI slop”) in web, image, and video search results. We will verify these reports using our own signals. If a domain primarily publishes AI-generated content, we will downrank it in Kagi Search and mark it as AI slop. If a page is AI-generated but the domain is mixed (not mostly AI), we will flag the page as AI-generated but will not downrank it.
For media results, images and videos confirmed as AI-generated, they will be labelled as such and automatically downranked on the results page. Users can also choose to filter out AI-generated media entirely.
I understand that running services costs money, and I’ve heard nothing but good things about Kagi. Can anyone here convince me it’s worth the price?
Search is essential to my job, so Kagi is well worth it. Better rankings than Google, clean results, no ads, kind of a no-brainer for me.
They have a free trial. Convince yourself
Tried and couldn’t! Was hoping someone here could highlight something I missed but seems no.
Running services costs money.
Does it really cost what Kagi is charging? I would love to see some research on this if people happen to know where to find such articles.
Like, in theory to pay for Kagi or a similar service but it’s just extrotionately expensive.
I pay for other service which are offered for free (like email hosting), but those are reasonably priced.
Can anyone here convince me it’s worth the price?
Depends on what you want from them and your financial situation.
For me, yeah, it is. I want to pay a service fee and not deal with ads or someone logging, profiling, and trying to figure out how to monetize my searches. For me, the $10/mo for unlimited searches tier is what I want. I’m principally concerned about privacy.
I don’t really take much advantage of most of the extra stuff they do other than the Threadiverse (they call it “Fediverse Forums”) search lens and sometimes their Usenet search engine. Maybe this effort to suppress AI-generated spam websites will be nice, but have to see what happens, as I expect that the SEO crowd creating spam websites will also aim to adapt if it becomes sufficiently impactful to their bottom line.
If one of their extra features particularly fits your use case (say, the ability to fiddle with website priorities or blacklist or pin them in your search results) that might be valuable to you, but I can’t speak as to that. I’ve seen people on here say that they really like that, but I don’t use that functionality. Or the ability to easily download images in results from their image search if you’re on mobile and are hitting something like pinterest, which is obnoxious on Google Images. Search bangs. Depends on what features you use and what each is worth to you.
Yeah, all of the above, but also: blacklisting Pinterest from all my searches is almost worth the ten bucks a month on its own, lmao.
I don’t have a problem paying for a good service. I do have a problem having all my searches, video or article views linked to an account (with my payment data i.e. real name no less).
Then I have great news for you! Kagi accept bitcoin, does not validate email addresses (so you can register as
fhhdsbgwg@hrjesbgwgw.comif that appeals to you), and they implemented privacy pass tokens that fully anonymize your searches. They also allows searching through tor!You still need to log in and link all your searches to each other. Those are trivial to de-anonymize you from.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/privacy/privacy-pass.html
When you enable Privacy Pass, instead of logging in with your Kagi account for each search, you use special cryptographic tokens. These tokens prove you have the right to use Kagi’s services without revealing who you are. This means your searches can’t be linked back to your account or to each other, providing an additional layer of privacy.
Obviously you lose some of the customization, but otherwise still a great service.
These tokens prove you have the right to use Kagi’s services without revealing who you are.
Ok that sounds like an actual technical solution that - to be honest - I wasn’t expecting here. Sadly, there’s way too many processes involved for me to consider this for myself. Also, I am not transferring a single penny to the divided states of southern northern america until I run out of options - but that’s just me.
I sincerely hope this works as advertised. People are quite sick of all the AI slop floating around …
It shows up for me in the UI. I imagine that it works, and if it doesn’t, it’ll be debugged.
I think that the bigger question is whether the rate of spam website creation will outpace the rate of human flagging of them.
Kagi’s process involves humans. I bet that the spam website stuff runs autonomously.
It runs autonomously to a degree, but a lot of these sites operate via posting a wide variety of content on the same domains, after those domains have previously gained status in search engines.
So for example, you’ll have a site like epiccoolcarnews[.]info hosting stuff like “How to get FREE GEMS in Clash of Clans” just because previously they posted an article about cars that Google thought was good so they ranked up the domain in their ranking algorithm.
Permanently downrank the domain, and eventually they have to start with a new domain that, as is the key part here, has no prior reputation, and thus has to work to actually get ranked up in search again.
They’re also going to be making this a public database, and have said they’ll use it to train AI-generated content detection tools that will probably be better at detecting “AI generated articles meant to appear legitimate by using common keywords and phrases”, rather than just “any text of any form that has been generated by AI” like other AI detection tools do, which would make them capable of automating the process a bit with regard to specifically search engines.
You had me until Kagi
EDIT: if you want to pay for a search engine, more power to you. I’d rather not pay for a service that likely has its own set of issues.
You can either pay for a service, or that service will utilise every single aspect of it to monetise you.
I’ll let Kagi prove itself as a viable option for a year or two before I jump on board.
Every service that goes paid eventually does ads too.
