These numbers exclude Ecosia, Brave, Qwant and all the other search engines that have seen a surge in sign-ups over the last few days.
You are also seeing people take the opportunity to switch browsers. Vivaldi specifically has reported substantial growth recently.
Article talking about DuckDuckGo: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/26/duckduckgo-installs-are-up-30-as-users-reject-being-force-fed-googles-ai-search/
A website to help you start your own journey: https://purchasewithpurpose.io/
Keep it up and spread the word. No better time to make an impact.
It’s a paid search engine and it’s quite excellent.
I have heard it is super good; however, when I tried it I felt it was about the same as Qwant or Starpage. Having said that, I acknowledge I did not really performed a good test, just browsed around a bit.
I do have a question, with all the corporate ghouls sucking up all our private data to resell later; how do we know Kagi is not just hoarding to enshitify? I honestly think if I paid another service just to wind up with them selling my data anyway I am going to have a rage stroke
“if you are not the customer, you are the product”. Or to phrase it differently: they have a strong incentive not to enshittify, as that would lose them lots of paying customers.
That being said, there is no guarantee that they will not turn shitty later. There never is and never will be, with any service you dont host yourself.
Sorry bud but that’s just naive; literally all the big corpos we hate now were beloved when they started. Kagi already dropped their first paid tier from 500 to 300 searches per month. I am not saying that they will necessarily enshittify but I would certainly not assume they won’t just because they are selling something (look at Plex for a very recent case)
I think you missed a “no” before “guarantee” but I understand the point. There are not guarantees but this one doesn’t even look like a good candidate to stay clean IMO (plus as a Canadian, I would not subscribe to an American company for the time being, I just saw their wiki to find out where they are based)
Thanks for your reply
yes. thanks.
windows 11 is paid. So is netflix
windows itself is not the main source of income for microsoft.
I tried both when I was originally planning to switch off Google and Startpage was my favorite of the bunch, but there’s were key queries it would fumble hard and I’d miss something I needed that Google (and later Kagi) found.
I also didn’t come away impressed enough my from Kagi demo to begin paying for it. If they weren’t leaning so hard into AI stuff I may have paid for a bit just to support the idea of a search engine that “you weren’t the product” as the saying goes.
You might want to check who owns it and which country’s war it is currently benefiting.
I can’t seem to find anything particularly damnning, can you give me a link or just a lede about this?
I pay for Kagi but would happily and eagerly stop if it’s funding israel or something
Russia, is that close enough
All I can find is that some 2% of their budget goes to Yandex licensing. Which is definitely a shame, but not worth a full on boycott for me. If it was a higher number, sure.
I… fail to see the problem?
They do use yandex services(russian state cloud provider) among others. That’s not that damning – its one of the few ‘independent’ (as in, not google or microsoft) search indexes.
That’s the only connection I know of, other than CEO named Vladimir.
Yandex is nice to use when I want to do a search that doesn’t give a fuck about DMCA shit.