Kagi Search

Kagi is a paid, ad-free search engine at $10/month (Starter: 300 searches) or $25/month (Professional: unlimited). Because it charges users rather than advertisers, results are ranked purely on quality — no SEO spam, no promoted garbage, no filter bubbles. The AI summary feature (Kagi Assistant) uses a mix of models including Claude and GPT-4 for synthesized answers on top of search results.

For researchers and power users who've grown frustrated with Google's result quality degrading year over year, Kagi is a revelation. The ability to boost or block specific domains means you can permanently suppress low-quality sites. Lens filters let you search within curated subsets of the web — academic, coding, news.

Where it falls short: the starter tier's 300-search limit is too low for daily use, and $25/month is a hard sell when Google is free. Worth it if you search extensively and care about result quality.