In my post about SearchGPT, I already mentioned that Google’s search results are becoming less and less relevant for me. The first page only shows large, shallow content factories, YouTube videos, and Reddit. The latter is the most helpful, but it’s far from good. Yet, there are so many blogs, specialized forums, and websites on the internet that would give me a faster and better answer.

But for Google, they just aren’t relevant. Google’s ranking seems to favor large websites with supposedly high reach. This is probably for monetary reasons, as Google’s customers aren’t the users, but the advertising partners. Advertising partners who use Google to display ads on large sites. To the users, Google’s actual product. And this is despite the founders themselves explaining in their whitepaper at Stanford University that search engines deliver different results when advertising is their monetary motivation. A few years later, they turned Google into one of the largest advertising companies in the world.

But running a search engine costs money. The servers for displaying search results and crawling the internet have to be bought and operated. Google pays for this (easily) with its advertising revenue. In 2023, Google earned $23 per user, per month. That’s the price Google gets for collecting, processing, and selling your data. And the better they know you, the better they can target you with ads. This includes an optimized sorting of search engine results.

But what’s the alternative? Search engines like DuckDuckGo and Ecosia also have to finance themselves somehow and do so, like Google, through advertising. Not personalized, according to them, but the customers are still not the users, but the advertising partners. A few weeks ago, however, I stumbled upon another alternative, a search engine with a complete focus on the user. No data collection, no ads.

The search engine is called Kagi, which is Japanese for key. Only publicly available since 2022, the search engine is still in its early stages, which you can notice in some places. Now and then, the German translation is missing, and sometimes the results aren’t optimal yet. You have to get used to searching “properly” again. And you have to get used to the fact that an independent search engine has its price. 300 searches per month cost $5.95, while unlimited searches and access to AI functions come in at $11.90. The German VAT of 19% is already included.

In return, however, you get search results that are prioritized by default based on their neutral utility for the searcher. Not based on your profile, but in general. My results and your results for the same search are identical. For the most part, at least. To give the user the ability to personalize without tracking their behavior, you can personally rank up to 1,000 websites, from “Block” to “Lower,” “Normal,” “Raise,” to “Pin.” Quora has rarely had good results for me, so I set the site to “Lower.” Facebook’s data collection gets on my nerves - “Block.” And so on. As I see fit, not Kagi.

So far, I’m very satisfied with Kagi. Sometimes I have to remind myself that the search engine doesn’t know me and I need to be more precise with my search. “21:9 hdr OLED gaming monitor” gives me exactly that: results for various 21:9 HDR OLED gaming monitors. This includes many different shops and manufacturer websites, because that’s what fits. If I actually want comparison tests, then I need to search more precisely. So it’s in my hands, and it feels good.