Kagi is a company created with the mission to humanize the web. Our goal is amplify the web of human knowledge, creativity and self-expression and provide the user tools to fight against the web of greed, ad-tech and user tracking.

Kagi is currently Kagi Search, a fast, private search engine, and Orion Browser, a fast, zero-telemetry browser. We plan to release an email service as well, creating a platform to experience the web in a private, secure and unbiased way.

Kagi is pronounced as Kah-gee. If still not sure, listen to it here.

Kagi Search is a quick, user-centric, 100% privacy-respecting search engine with results augmented by non-commercial indexes and personalized searches. It has a clean, high-performance user interface with only the most relevant results and no telemetry, no ads and no collection of private information. Read more about its unique features.

We hope it will help users amplify their abilities and make them more creative and smarter as well as more productive.

While we're in public beta, we don't feel like our vision is fully realized and ready for prime time. But we also don't want to build something in isolation. We want to build it with you, our users. During this time we plan to fix bugs, introduce more core feature and improve stability of the product. You can read more about this in our public beta announcement post.

All search engines have: Search costs, Development costs and Administrative costs. Most search engines cover this by advertising, tracking, and selling your data. We attempt to cover it with a simple subscription of USD $10 a month.

Our proposed price is dictated by the fact that search itself has a non-zero cost. In fact, it costs us about $1 to process 80 searches (wherever in the world you search from). So a user searching 8 times a day would perform about 240 searches a month, costing us $3 in search cost. But an average Kagi beta user is actually searching about 30 times a day. At USD $10/month, the price does not even cover our cost for average use, and we are basically betting that in the future we will be able to improve the product to reduce average number of searches needed to find something and reduce search cost by optimizations, to not only cover search cost but make room to pay for other costs as well.

Our goal is to find the minimum price at which we can sustain the business. USD $10/mo is a price-point that we lowered as much as we could hoping it will allow us to have a chance of hitting sustainability at some point. If it turns out that we have more room we will decrease it. But it can also be that we may need to increase it.

The cost of running free accounts is also substantial and it also has to be covered by paying customers, which makes the above math even harder. Tips are a way to help offset some of that cost.

All of the above has to be set up in a way that after subtracting search cost we are still having left over to pay for the development costs (salaries) and the administrative costs.

Kagi has been driven by a vision of a more humane web and funded completely out of founder's pocket. You can read more about the financials in our first update after the public beta launch.

This has allowed Kagi to follow only one agenda and that is the agenda of user-centric products.

We are planning to offer our users to be investors in Kagi down the road. Kagi remains commited to the path of staying truly user-centric.

We have a browser extension for all major browsers. The extensions sets Kagi as the default search engine and allows you to search with Kagi even in a private window.

• Chromium based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi...) download here.
• Firefox based browsers download here. If you use Firefox on Android, check this guide (it doesn't set Kagi as the default search engine, but it allows search in private mode to work normally as expected).
• Safari macOS download here, Safari iOS download here. Some users use xSearch and HyperWeb extensions for Safari which also support Kagi.

If you use macOS/iOS consider trying Orion browser, made by same folks who made Kagi Search - us! Orion is a WebKit-based browser for Mac, with native integration with Kagi Search.

Google’s search engine has indeed changed the world and the way we access information, and we value this contribution. We’re grateful to have access to Google's search technology and infrastructure for Kagi.

But instead of trying to create a search product for billions of people, we want to develop a refined search experience for sophisticated customers who value high-quality results, privacy and speed.

Kagi will allow you to discover well-written articles from lesser-known blogs and use features like Lenses to personalize results. Ad-supported search must avoid this kind of depth and flexibility to stay profitable. Read more about Kagi's unique features, many of which can never be replicated in ad-supported search engine.

We do not see Kagi as the Google killer. Google's scale and reach is enourmous and Google serves a purpose in the world - it did help enable the modern society to exist, with all its marvels and flaws. Heck, it even enables Kagi to exist!

Think of Kagi as a small, premium brand, providing a very different, tailor-made, search experience for people who need and appreciate that.

DuckDuckGo has shown the world that a privacy-first search engine is possible, and we respect this contribution. But its innovation has slowed in the past decade. And Ad-supported business models will always force a company to make compromises and balance between serving users and advertisers. At the end, DuckDuckGo's search product is just ”good enough” (by our standard, sorry DuckDuckGo!) and has been stagnant years without any ground-breaking feature development.

In contrast, Kagi search does not need to compromise on user experience. Everything we do is user-centric. Kagi Search already has many unique features, like personalized results and "Lenses". And because we depend only on our users for revenue, Kagi can and will always offer a much richer search experience for the user.

Yes, Kagi supports all DuckDuckGo-style bangs.

You should pay for your search engine to ensure that the incentives of the information provider are aligned with what’s best for you, not what’s best for the advertisers.

Every “free” search engine out there comes with a hidden cost. Your private details pass through your searches, and search results influenced by advertising spends can influence your thoughts and actions. Businesses that monetize your data owe you more than just a "free" account! Our stand against ad-supported business models has created a 100% ad-free search experience, focused entirely on our users.

If you want a search experience tailored to you and your needs, one that could also make the world a slightly better place, then you need to break free from the ruts that advertisers and corporations have guided us into. Investing in Kagi is investing in a more humane web, your online future and the future of your children, if you believe in them growing in a world where they are not bombarded with ads from an early age.

We will let no other than the founders of Google explain this. The year is 1998, and this is how they describe why it is imperative for search engines to be ad-free:

"Currently, the predominant business model for commercial search engines is advertising. The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. For example, in our prototype search engine one of the top results for cellular phone is "The Effect of Cellular Phone Use Upon Driver Attention", a study which explains in great detail the distractions and risk associated with conversing on a cell phone while driving. This search result came up first because of its high importance as judged by the PageRank algorithm, an approximation of citation importance on the web [Page, 98].

It is clear that a search engine which was taking money for showing cellular phone ads would have difficulty justifying the page that our system returned to its paying advertisers. For this type of reason and historical experience with other media [Bagdikian 83], we expect that advertising funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers."

The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998

They were right in recognizing early on that ad-supported search engines will be biased towards the advertisers. What they probably could not foresee is how much damage to the web adopting the very model they originally criticised will ultimately make.

We use heuristics and deep learning to understand query intent, select the best information sources, query them directly using APIs, and rank the results. You can think of Kagi as a "search client," working like an email client, connecting to indexes and sources to find relevant results and package them into a superior, secure and privacy-respecting search experience for you.

Our searching includes anonymized requests to traditional search indexes like Google and Bing as well as vertical sources like Wikipedia and DeepL or other APIs. We also have our own non-commercial index (Teclis), news index (TinyGem), and an AI for instant answers.

Teclis and TinyGem are a result of our crawl through millions of domains, focusing primarily on non-commercial, high-quality content. Our unique results help you discover some of the best content you can possibly find online, sometimes in the quieter places on the web.

And of course, we answer quick queries like “How far is the sun from the earth?” or “10kg in lbs” with our instant-answer systems that use dozens of sources and APIs, all connected to you quickly yet transparently.

Kagi can surface unique, high-quality, non-commercial content while avoiding results bloated by ads and tracking. Kagi's non-commercial index (Teclis) and non-commercial news index (TinyGem) as well as instant answers (IA) offer high-quality, relevant and authentic results for the user. Clicking "Info" in search results will show a percentage of these unique Kagi results in search results.

Take a look at Kagi’s responses to a “steve jobs” query.

These results are authentic to Kagi. To provide them, we even crawl the Wayback Machine to dig up great content that no longer exists in its original state online. In every search, Kagi will always display unique results when possible as well as some of the typical fare.

With Kagi, you also get to influence search results. You can mute or favor domains, giving you an unprecedented level of personalization and refinement. And finally with Kagi’s "Lenses" you can define filters to narrow the scope of certain searches. A "Programming" or "Recipes" Lens can provide results only from sites you trust. .

We believe the name of the game in search is quality, not quantity. Search engine's job is to provide the best answer fast and within the reach of one or two pages of results. If the user needs to go to page 17 to find what they were looking for, we would have failed anyway.

Also note that one page of Kagi results will show 20-30 organic results compared to just 10 results typically shown on other search engines. So two pages of Kagi results are actually an equivalent of about six pages of results in other search engines!

Other search engines may also show an inflated number of results available. The reality is they do not really have that many which you can check yourself by clicking through pages of their results, which one point abruptly stop. So between deceiving users with provisional high number and showing the best results we think there are, we chose the latter.

We feel our approach is in line with our values. In the unlikely event of not finding what you are looking for, you can always modify the query slightly to get new results.

No! Some results from traditional sources will reflect biases beyond our control. Also, we have built product features to help with bias reduction. For example, our "News 360" Lens includes articles from respectable media outlets across the globe.

We are very careful not to introduce a precedent with any type of bias. This sometimes leads to constructive debate with our community, like this one.

What we do have is a strict search-quality bias. We penalize sites that bloated with ads and trackers. Simple as that.

Our algorithm primarily focuses on relevancy and user intent. When it makes sense, we try to prioritize non-commercial sources. A highly relevant answer to your query from a monetized site will fall lower in your results than the same answer from an educational site. Of course, if a site has a naturally high rank, Kagi factors that in as well. And if you personalize your searches, domains you mute will lose ground to domains you prefer.

Nope. Say goodbye to those paid entries at the top of your results page, because Kagi only shows the organic results to your queries.

Yes. We’re developing our Maps app, already available in Kagi, and we’ll soon add map results to the main search results page.

Yes. We know our users love these features, and so do we! They’re next on our development agenda.

”Free” search engines have two ways to make money – get more users or sell more ads per user. The easiest, fastest way is to mine more data to sell ads more effectively. Many search-engine companies have buckled under investor pressure, leading us to the online privacy issues we have today.

Paid models like Kagi only make money when users pay us, and users only pay when they receive great value. We offer superior result quality, features, speed and of course privacy. If we compromise on any of these points, we lose users. Therefore we have to offer a better product that includes the best possible privacy.

We designed our product to give you a good answer and get you on your way instead of forcing you to wade through a swamp of results that have leeches lurking under the surface.

Only bare necessities to run the service. Please see our privacy policy for more information.

Let us reiterate that we do not log searches or in any way tie them to an account. Our business model is to sell subscriptions, not user data.

While it is virtually impossible for us to prove that, nor it is impossible to charge for the service without people having an account, we simply have no incentive to do it.

Kagi’s business model is unlike any other search engine. This means we don’t need or want your personal information (it would just be an unwelcome liability). In fact the only data we take is the email address, which can be any email address really, as long as you can use it to recover your account. There is no other personal information shared with Kagi. By choosing this business model we know that we are going to have far less users than mainstream search engine for example, but we have also removed any incentive to misuse any information you have shared with us.

The simplest way is by using an official extension listed here.

Basically, Kagi features a 'login token' which is simply a URL parameter that you can use to automatically log you into your existing Kagi session, from anywhere, including using search within private browser sessions. You can visit Account settings to get your login token.

This token is attached to the session it was copied from. You can log out of that session if you need to invalidate it for any reason.

Ahhh... speed. We’re obsessed with increasing speed and lowering latency, and we currently use three approaches. First, we optimized our technology stack to increase code execution speed and decrease connection latency.

Then we reduced data transfer between Kagi and the browser, in some cases as much as 20x less compared to some of our competitors! This reduction has the neat side-effect of reducing CO2 emissions. Using Kagi Search will benefit the environment as well as you!

Finally, our infrastructure is global, so you’ll always connect automatically to the Kagi node closest to you.

The table below should give you a general idea about how Kagi stacks up compared to some of the most popular search engines around.

Certainly! We take pride in our index of high-quality, non-commercial results. Check ”Interesting Finds” for relevant yet slightly unusual results or ”Blast from the Past” for answers that exist only in the historical archives of the internet.

You can also get instant answers to direct questions from Kagi’s AI, like “5*123,” “10 ft in meters” or “translate hello to spanish.”

In Kagi, you can use typical search operators as well as the search bangs popularized by DuckDuckGo. For example, if you want to find TVs on Amazon, you can enter “!a tv” and go right to Amazon’s TV selections.

If you know CSS, you can customize your search results page into nearly any style. This feature is an example of our power-user settings, with more on the horizon.

Finally, Kagi Lenses allows you to specify what sites you see in your results. We provide a couple of Lenses to get you started, such as one to search only online discussions and forums.

Chromium based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Brave, Opera, Vivaldi...)

Desktop:

1. Open this URL in your search bar: chrome://settings/searchEngines
2. Click Add and fill:
   * Search engine: Kagi Search
   * Keyword: kagi
   * Query URL: https://kagi.com/search?q=%s
3. Click the three dots
4. Click "Make default"

1. Open https://kagi.com/, login and submit a search.
2. Open your browser’s settings. Choose “Search engine”.
3. Select Kagi Search from the Recently Visited section

Firefox based browsers

1. Open https://kagi.com, then right click browser address/search bar and select "Add Kagi Search".
2. Open this URL in your search bar: about:preferences#search
3. Scroll to "Default Search Engine" and select Kagi from the dropdown.

Safari

Desktop

1. Install the Kagi Search for Safari extension from one of our community members.
2. Activate the extension in Safari -> Preferences -> Extensions.
3. Enjoy Kagi search from your Safari address bar!

But a much better alternative is Orion browser, made by same folks who made Kagi Search - us! Orion is a WebKit-based browser for Mac, with native integration with Kagi Search.

iOS
Use Orion iOS browser (still in beta) which has native support for Kagi Search.

If you prefer to use Safari, you can use Kagi Search for Safari.

Custom use
For search URL use:
https://kagi.com/search?q={searchTerms}

and for autosuggestions use:
https://kagi.com/api/autosuggest?q={searchTerms}

Private session link

To use Kagi Search inside a private browser session you can use the session link.

Yes. Kagi respects "Reduce motion" accessibility setting in your OS (name can differ). Here is where to find it:

• In macOS: System Preferences > Accessibility > Display > Reduce motion.
• In iOS: Settings > General > Accessibility > Reduce Motion.
• In Windows 11: Settings > Accessibility > Visual Effects > Animation Effects
• In Windows 10: Settings > Ease of Access > Display > Show animations in Windows.
• In Windows 7: Control Panel > Ease of Access > Make the computer easier to see > Turn off all unnecessary animations (when possible).
• In Android 9+: Settings > Accessibility > Remove animations.
• In GTK/GNOME: GNOME Tweaks > General tab (or Appearance, depending on version) > Animations is turned off.
• In Plasma/KDE: System Settings > Workspace Behavior -> General Behavior > "Animation speed" is set all the way to right to "Instant".

We simply call him ”doggo” for now.

If you press ? on your keyboard (shift + /) while in search results, Kagi will open a help menu with search operators and other keyboard shortcuts that we support.

The designer insisted that Kagi logo is "anchored" in the letter "g" and we had to agree. Besides, can't let Google own letter "g" too, can we? ;)

No. That Kagi went bankrupt in an unfortunate turn of events. We liked the name and acquired it when we got the chance.

It depends. Do you have advanced Crystal (backend) and/or vanilla JavaScript (frontend) knowledge? Can you solve difficult problems and code exceptionally well? (We’ll send a test project.) Send your CV to vlad@kagi.com.

Fun fact: entire Kagi Search runs with no JavaScript enabled in the browser. We see JavaScript as a way to enhance product experience, not create it.

If you discover potential security issues on our platform, please notify our security contact.

The Kagi beta Discord server is a great way to provide feedback and have direct communication with our team.

You can join this server here.

For feature requests and bug reports, please submit to kagifeedback.org instead.

The Kagi Discord server has an #appearance channel where people are sharing custom CSS examples. A community member also started a subreddit, which would be nice to see people contributing to.

Yes! You can go to Kagi Assets to view all of our assets and download them!

Please email support@kagi.com for customer support.

Kagi's founder is Vladimir Prelovac: "With Kagi and Orion, we’re striving to build better ways to experience the web, ways that are safe yet fun for everyone, including my own kids."

Kagi was created in 2018 and is running on tight budget, bootstrapped by the founder. Kagi is based in SF Bay Area, and is being built by an international team.

We are also building Orion, an insanely fast, privacy-respecting browser, currently in beta for Mac.

We hope that our work impacts people's lives in some small way for the better. Thank you very much for your interest in being a part of this!

Kagi Inc.
Palo Alto, CA
email: vlad@kagi.com
phone: (650) 535 2700