Search today sure aint what it used to be.On the one hand, youve got the escalating sense that Googles once-reliable results are stuck in a downward spiral. Its a perception weve been seeing take shape for some time now, even before Google Search started pushing accuracy-challenged AI answers into its search engine and steering people away from first-party sources.On the other hand, youve got AI-powered info engines ranging from ChatGPT and Perplexity to Googles own Gemini chatbot now browsing the web for you and offering up immediate (if occasionally also inaccurate) answers. For the first time, thats raising pressing questions about the long-term fate of the conventional search experienceall while Google and other providers struggle to keep junky AI-generated info from clouding their results.Its a rare moment when something thats long felt like an unshakable part of our lives suddenly seems vulnerable, and the way we seek out info online is open to reassessment.Amid all of that, Kagia company with a minuscule fraction of Googles resourcessees an opportunity to convince people to stop turning to Google for search, quit leaning on inconsistent AI answers for important information, and start seeking out a smarter way to find what they need without all the cascading compromises.Kagis founder insists it isnt a Google killerand, quite critically, it was never meant to be. But two arenas worth of early adopters see it differently, including plenty of Redditors, Hacker News commenters, and even Apple oracle John Gruber, who recently declared Kagi the best search engine in the world.And the more you hear about this utopian vision for what the web could be, the easier it is to understand the enthusiasm.Red pill momentVladimir Prelovac started sensing a shift in the online search arena as far back as 2018, long before the name ChatGPT had entered the common vernacular or most people thought Google might be in any way vulnerable to a serious search competitor.Prelovac had just sold his former company, a WordPress management platform called ManageWP, to GoDaddy and was raring for a fresh challenge. While the exact price of the acquisition was never made public, Prelovac had enough cash in his coffers to bootstrap a new startup, without any outside funding, and he knew exactly what problem he wanted to pursue.I had my red pill moment, Prelovac says, referring to the scene in The Matrix when Keanu Reevess character takes a red pill, unplugs from the simulation hes been living in, and sees the world as it actually exists for the first time. I realized Google is basically insulting my intelligence, and the [Google Search] product wasnt being built for me. It was pretty eye-opening.(Kagi did eventually raise a small round of $670,000 in 2023 and then a second round of $1.9 million in 2024.)Prelovac says he increasingly saw signs that Googles actual customers were the businesses paying to advertise on its search result pagesnot the people looking to those same pages for information. He grew disillusioned with what he describes as a deteriorating experience and a lack of exceptional alternatives. So he decided to do something about it.I thought it was ridiculous that we didnt have a product thats actually serving the users, not the advertisers, he says. I quickly realized the only way to [fix that] is to create a paid subscription-based service, because thats the only business model that would align incentives.Prelovac set out to prove his theory. Within about a year, he had an early prototype of a new service called Kagia Japanese word that rhymes with froggy and means key, suggesting the way Prelovac hoped to unlock a friendlier, more user-centric web model.Now, seven years later, Kagi boasts 38,000 paying subscribers, a figure that continues to grow, with rates running from $5 to $25 per month. (Most people should probably pick the middle-of-the-road $10 Professional plan, which allows unlimited searches and access to some of the simpler AI features.) Those figures pale in comparison to the throngs of people who visit Google each day and the billions of dollars Google makes from its search product, of course.But in Prelovacs mind, thats precisely the pointand the key to Kagis future.Unlocking a smarter search journeyThe best way to describe Kagi is as a less cluttered, more capable, and more customizable version of what were all used to seeing from Google Searchonly without the ads, the shopping results, and other assorted distractions.Kagi sports a refreshingly clutter-free and customizable interface.You also wont find artificial intelligence answers forced in your face above regular web results, though you can get to Kagis own version of the chatbot concept if you like. (More on that and how it differs from the typical AI chatbot experience in a moment.)Primarily, Kagi is about taking you to the first-party web info related to whatever youre seeking and making that experience as effective, premium-feeling, and pleasant as possible. It really is a refreshing change, too, once you get past the inevitable initial adjustment and the occasional muscle-memory-jarring momentone that opens your eyes to the type of web experience that almost feels more aspirational than realistic in this day and age. And yet, here it is.If the user is paying you as a search product company, then youre incentivized to make search better and better, Prelovac reasons. Otherwise, they walk away with their wallet.To that end, in addition to the lack of ads and sponsored elements within its results, Kagi empowers you to do things like block specific websites from your results, increase the weight of sites you like in results, and customize nearly everything about the interfaceranging from which widgets and types of results show up to all sorts of settings around the sites appearance and behavior.Kagi continuously works to remind you that its your search experience, and you should be in control. Its a lovely upgrade from the effort-requiring work-arounds weve all grown accustomed to pursuing for any manner of meaningful customization or unreliable-AI-answer avoiding in the standard search arena, and its something you really resent losing when you go back to Google or any other more conventional search service.You can customize practically everything about the way Kagi looks and functions.Kagi even allows you to create your own custom lenses, which are search filters that show you results only from specific sets of websites, making it easy to limit a search to something like academic sites, forums, or your own personal domains on demand and with virtually no ongoing effort.Kagis lenses are an interesting way to limit certain searches to specific sorts of sites.And all of that is still just scratching the surface of how Kagi works to reshape search, both inside and out.A revamped window to the webEven if you dont customize a thing or exert much energy thinking about the interface, youll notice some significant differences in what Kagis like to use compared to the status quo. The service combines its custom web index with search results from almost every other search engine in the world, as Prelovac describes itwhich, rather ironically, suggests youre actually seeing at least some Google results within Kagi.But Kagi puts all of that data through its own special blender before serving it up to youand, as youd imagine, it includes assurances that your search data will never be saved or used for any manner of advertising. The aim is to create the perfect mix of high-quality results that actually answer what youre after without making you want to gouge your eyes out.We push down sites that have a lot of ads and trackers, because that usually correlates with low-quality content, and we push up results that have very little ads or no ads and tracking on them, which usually correlates with high-quality content and somebody writing because its their passion, Prelovac says.Kagis index also brings in an added emphasis on what Prelovac calls the noncommercial or small webpersonal blogs, discussions, and other off-the-beaten-path sites that tend to get buried in results from Google as well as the newer breed of large language model chatbots.This atypical approach is apparent with practically every search you perform within Kagi. If I search for best usb-c to 3.5mm adapter, for instance, Google gives me a screen thats heavy on ads and other sales-oriented offerings. Kagi, in contrast, focuses on Reddit threads and recommendations from lots of lesser-known sites that would never show up in a standard search setup.Googles results, left, compared to KagisIf I enter a more specific, black-and-white questionlike Is the Galaxy S25 worth buying?Google gives me a bunch of YouTube videos followed by related queries, a block of news stories, and then a single Reddit thread and some more YouTube videos. Kagi serves up a simple summary of different opinions, with clear citations alongside each point, followed by articles at a variety of sites both big and small that seek to answer the inquiry.Kagi also offers a one-click Quick Answer option to get a summary of all the top results for any inquiry on the spot. Plus, within each individual result, it provides a handy Summarize page command that shows you the high points of any pages contents right there, no extra clicks or browser tabs required.By and large, though, Kagi really does make its AI elements easy to avoid. The options are available if you want emsome tucked away into the services $25-per-month Ultimate subscription. That plan gives you access to Kagis Gemini- and ChatGPT-like Assistant chatbot, which combines large language models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Meta, and other organizations together with Kagis own web results. The system keeps all of your data private and lets you see info from any of those sources with Kagis custom filtering in place, which Prelovac hopes will lead to more refined results than what youd get directly from any of the associated chatbots.AI is limited by what you feed into it, Prelovac explains. It all goes back to incentives.The big question, then, is how many people are willing to cough up the cash to enjoy these enhancements.The search for sustainabilityPrelovac says Kagi is already profitable, achieving a level of success never experienced by the higher-profile Neeva, a paid search service launched by former Google executives in 2021 and shut down roughly two years later.In Prelovacs view, the key differences between Neeva and his creation are the motivation and the metric for success. Neeva raised $77.5 million in funding, with investments from venture-capital bigwigs like Greylock and Sequoia. So despite amassing a pool of 2 million paying usersa number that dwarfs Kagis current base of paying membersit never managed to make enough money to be seen as sustainable.Its funny that for them, its a failure[and] for us, its a success, Prelovac says.On that note, Prelovac deliberately doesnt think of his service as attempting to be a Google killer, as I alluded to earlier. In his eyes, Kagi and Google dont share the same customers, so theres no way they could be competing with each other directlydespite the fact that they serve similar surface-level purposes.Googles customers are the advertisers. Ours are the users, he says. The source of money for Google and source of money for us comes from totally different market segments.Kagi is also working to set itself apart by developing its own WebKit-based browser, Orion, which includes a smattering of privacy-minded additions while putting the Kagi search service front and center. Its available only for macOS and iOS at the moment, which means I wasnt able to use it, personally, as Im more of a Windows and Android kind of guy. But Prelovac says itll make its way to other platforms eventually.Without Orion in the mix, getting other browsers to rely on Kagi for their native search functions can be a bit of an adventure. Kagi offers an extension that handles the setup for you, and if youre using Safari, thats the only choice youve got. With Chromium-based browsers and also Firefox, you can instead just make a few reasonably easy adjustments in your browsers settings to accomplish the same feat.The same applies for most mobile browsersagain with the exception of Safari, which requires the use of the Kagi extensionor you can just download the native Kagi Android and iOS apps and start your searches there.The real challenge, then, is continuing to convince people to deal with those hurdles while also paying for something theyve so long seen as a freebie.We are going against one of the most entrenched habits in societythat search is somehow God-given and free, almost like a rightwhere in reality, its just a service provided by one of the wealthiest tech companies in the world, Prelovac says.One stat he finds encouraging is that once people get in the door at Kagi, they tend to stick around at unusually high numbers. All Kagi subscriptions start with a 100-search free trial, and Prelovac says about 20% of people who start a trial continue on to a paid plan from there. Even just in the few weeks that Ive been watching the service closely, Ive seen its self-reported stats of paying members climb by around 1,000 peoplewhich is somewhere in the ballpark of 3% growth, at this scale. (Kagi has also grown internally, with 40 employees as of the start of 2025, up from 25 when Fast Company wrote about the company just over a year ago.)Still, convincing people to pony up $5 to $25 per month for something theyve been trained to expect at no cost is a constant mountain to climb.Its easy to compete with cheap and bad [by offering] high-quality and expensive, Prelovac says. But there are very little analogies in the past where a company has tried to compete with free.The real saving grace may be Kagis goal, which is less about stealing a significant share of Googles users and more about simply finding enough interest to make itself sustainable long into the future.Speaking of that long-term view, Kagis next ambitions include releasing a stand-alone version of its Assistant AI chatbot later this year, launching more native apps across all desktop and mobile platforms after that, and eventually building up an entire integrated portfolio of cross-platform products that equip people to say so long to Big Tech in all sorts of areas beyond just search.But for now, its one day and one won-over user at a time. And as for the question of if and when a mass of internet citizens might join the movement and decide search is something worth paying forfor the moment, at least, thats a question even Kagi cant answer.Discover all sorts of off-the-beaten-path productivity treasures with my free Cool Tools newslettera single new inspiring discovery in your inbox every Wednesday!