What if the Internet were not all ads? What would it look like to search it as a human seeking information, rather than as a potential product served up to advertisers?
Palo Altan Vladimir Prelovac wanted to find out. So he created Kagi.com, a premium ad-free subscription-based search engine that offers many customizable tools and features to enrich the experience.
He started working on Kagi (the name comes from the Japanese word for “key”) in 2018, after one of his three children got a Chromebook in school and he had an epiphany that he did not want his kids growing up to be profiled their entire lives, with their personal information constantly going to advertisers. Kagi launched in 2022.
“Companies optimize for their customers, and Google is no exception – the problem is their customers are advertisers,” Prelovac said. “With a paid business model, our incentives are directly aligned with the user’s needs. If they don’t find value in it, they’re free to leave. With free search engines, you don’t have that power, because ultimately you’re not the customer. You get what you pay for.”
So far, more than 40,000 subscribing users agree.
“With a paid business model, our incentives are directly aligned with the user’s needs. If they don’t find value in it, they’re free to leave. ”
– Vladimir Prelovac
Born in Yugoslavia, Prelovac has more than 20 years of experience working on web-based technologies. He moved to Palo Alto with his family in 2016 after his previous startup was acquired by GoDaddy. Kagi, he said, is trying to change the paradigm of how we search, to change it from being exploitive into a process that’s useful and works in searchers’ best interests. Legally a public benefit corporation, the company’s stated mission is to humanize the web and bring self-expression and creativity back to its forefront. The search engine surfaces more organic results, including personal blogs and human discussions. Features include their unique algorithms that deliver high-quality relevant results and down-rank pages with a lot of ads and trackers; no data retention; the ability to promote or block specific domains for your own searches; tools to show you how many trackers are on a page you are considering visiting; and customizable thematic search lenses.
“Thirty to forty years ago we didn’t care what we put in our bodies, and then we became aware of toxins and organic food, and now we’re careful about what we put in our bodies,” he said. “Now we’re starting to value information and care about what we put in our heads and where we get it from.”
To find out more, go to Kagi.com and try their 100-search free trial.
Kagi | Kagi.com