A Three Month Review of Kagi Search & The Orion Web Browser
There’s a new web search in town. No, it’s not a re-skin of Bing results. No, it’s not an AI powered tool chasing this particular moment of Large Language Model (LLM) hype. Kagi is an honest to goodness general purpose search engine with a simple proposal:
A few of you just got very excited, and some others just closed this tab. Kagi is a very unusual product in 2024. The tool isn’t without its quirks, but it’s the sort of service you can easily write a few thousand words discussing. If you’re interested in technology and the web, it’s worth signing up and kicking their tires.
Kagi’s been building buzz for the last year, but I’d been dragging my heels on making the switch. It turns out the way to keep New Year’s tech resolutions is to replace your app defaults. Here’s my assorted thoughts after a January, February, and March without Google and Safari.
It’s hard not to talk about the state of the web as a whole when discussing search engines. The internet’s having a bit of a moment. Longstanding websites like Twitter and Reddit are making antagonistic moves against their user bases. Google and Amazon are dealing with a floor of affiliate links and search engine optimized sludge. Looming on the horizon, LLM outputs threatens to swallow the web whole.
