Kagi is a subscription-funded search engine that serves no ads and builds no user profiles. Results are drawn from its own crawl combined with third-party indices, and users can up-rank, down-rank, or block specific domains. A free trial allows up to 150 searches before a paid plan is required.
Reviewed by Marcus Holmberg
Kagi
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Threat level
Covered
A covered pick. Anyone can use it as a private drop-in, with no setup or know-how. Enough for most people. Threat levels
Our take
The user-funded model is what makes Kagi’s privacy promise credible: when there are no advertisers to serve, there is no financial reason to track clicks. Result quality is a subjective call, but the ability to permanently demote low-quality content farms from your results is a practical differentiator. The obvious catch is the cost; Kagi is the only search engine in this directory that requires payment for regular use, and that price point will rule it out for many users. It is the pick for people who are already paying for a privacy stack and want search to match.
Website at a glance
kagi.com
B- score 65
Solid website security headers
Graded by Mozilla HTTP Observatory, tested 14d ago
Inspect this site yourself
Measures the security configuration of the tool's own website, not the privacy of the product itself. A strong tool can still score low here.
Kagi alternatives
Brave Search Blog post about the new Brave Search beta . Based in the US. Launched in June 2021.
Mojeek A crawler-based search engine that provides independent search results using its own index of web pages, rather than using results from other search engines. Based in the UK.…
DuckDuckGo Privacy-focused search engine and mobile browser that blocks trackers and searches without profiling you. Partially open source, based in the US.
Startpage Obtains Google search results while protecting users' privacy. Based in the Netherlands. Launched in 1998.
Qwant French private search engine, EU-hosted, no personal data stored, blending its own index with Bing results.
SearXNG The actively maintained successor to Searx. Self-hostable, open source metasearch engine. Users can access existing public instances.
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