Kagi – a paid search engine that supports the small web

I write a lot about enshittification and products in decline, but the reason I care about that is because I really love it when people care about the things they do. I’ve realised that’s the common thread that ties everything on this blog together, and therefore I’ve made a commitment to myself to also call out things that I like, which were made by people who obviously do care.

So it was a pleasant surprise when an uptick in blog traffic over recent weeks led me down a rabbit hole. At the bottom, I discovered Kagi – a search engine with an uncompromising mission aligned with many of my own values.

What is Kagi anyway?

It began with a mystery. Over the last couple of weeks, my site received a decent number of views across several pages originating from kagi.com. I had a vague recollection of the name, but naturally I went searching to find out what Kagi is and why it might suddenly be pointing people to my blog.

It turns out Kagi is an alternative search engine. Founded in 2018, it aims to “humanise the web”, delivering search without the advertising, trackers, and distractions that plague the results on sites like Google. It achieves this via a subscription model, with pricing ranging from $5 to $25 per month.

Kagi has a neat design and an admirable goal, but even if its philosophy completely mirrors my own, that still might not justify spending the money to switch from Google. However, when I ran some searches to test its output, I realised that its ethos runs a lot deeper than its business model.

A better web search

First, you probably underestimate how much your Google experience has been enshittified. The obtrusive adverts crept in so early that it’s a shock to return to search results that don’t require careful study to identify the first organic link. Browsing a Kagi search is like a breath of fresh air in 2026.

Kagi also seeks to avoid skewing your results. “We are very careful not to introduce a precedent with any type of non search quality related bias (including moral, political, [or] any other type of bias),” it says in its FAQs.

You probably underestimate how much your Google experience has been enshittified... Kagi search is like a breath of fresh air.

Because it’s not trying to impart bias of its own, Kagi can also let users implement their own preferences. Each result is accompanied by a pop-up site profile to give you more information on the source, and you can add a weighting to either prioritise the site in future results or remove it entirely.

Add to this the concept of Lenses – customisable filters that arrange results according to region, groups of websites, keywords, file types, and so on – and you’re suddenly equipped with quite a powerful toolset for finding the results you’re looking for, and not the ones the search engine thinks you want.

Supporting the small web

But coolest of all for me is that Kagi is designed to promote the small web – that subset of websites that still feel like the classic internet of the 1990s and 2000s. We’re talking simple designs, fast load times, and unique, personal content free of the dark patterns pervasive on the commercial web.

Pages with ads and trackers are downranked, which also helps to hide the SEO spam that dominates many Google results, since those sites earn their money via excessive advertising. This leaves a refreshing mix of reputable sources and small, organic websites that are hidden by most search engines.

I verified this by searching for terms related to my recent articles (no filters, location set to UK). In a search for “Nvidia DLSS 5”, my article ranked second behind Nvidia’s own post. “F1 regulations 2026” returned my post behind only the official FIA and Formula 1 websites. My posts also frequently seem to appear in the Interesting News section at the top of the News tab.

What’s even nicer is that Kagi doesn’t leave this down to the luck of the algorithm – it maintains a list of small websites on GitHub to boost in its results. I found my site’s feed in smallweb.txt, at line 17,584 of 34,000. So it was a double surprise – not only that I’m getting more eyes on the blog via Kagi, but that somebody thought to submit my blog to the list!

But at a higher level, Kagi is something I love to see. It’s an organisation with a set of principles centred on product quality. It knows what it is and who it is for, and hasn’t succumbed to the biggest temptation of the online economy – the pursuit of endless growth regardless of the sacrifices required to chase it. That’s both admirable and increasingly rare in business. Kagi achieved profitability in 2024, and I hope it finds continued success in its niche.