Essay Nº 002 — web services

Kagi - trying a new search engine

Patrick Müller · September 26, 2025 · 1 minute read web services

Lots of issues with the model of advertising financed search engines are well known: they incentivized to prioritize advertiser-related features like placing ads at the top of the search.

One option to have an alternative to this is to offer a commercial search engine, which is what Kagi is doing.

It has some nice features:

  • No AI summaries or so at the top - these things can also be configured
  • Personalized settings like excluding specific websites

Here is one thing I'd wish for from this or any other search engine: I've looked at sites that claim to detect if some text was created by AI - it would be cool to be able to set a filter removing all sites where the majority of content was written by AI. Not that I'd necessarily always use it, but it feels like a valuable option to have.