Kagi

DeepSeek published Search and Fetch APIs at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests, billed only on HTTP 200 responses. Calls routed through Claude Code, Codex or DeepSeek's own harness are free until 00:00 Beijing time on November 1, 2026.

The first reply was a price check: Kagi's API runs $12 per 1,000 searches. Then a hobbyist who built his own agent tools said the big labs' bundled search costs 15-20x more than his.

Mike Elgan says Google News now returns social-media pages and results from the wrong country or language, while searches limited to the past week can surface stories that are weeks or months old.

Readers did not merely complain: they named paid alternatives such as Kagi and Ground News, suggesting that basic control over ranking has become a product feature.

After trying Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave Search, Qwant, and a self-hosted SearxNG instance, a blogger resubscribed to Kagi — a paid search engine — and wrote up exactly why nothing else stuck.

Google was the biggest letdown: "terrible" results, prioritizing multimedia over the plain text he was actually searching for — "I just want to look up some text."

The clincher wasn't search quality alone — it was Kagi's built-in custom CSS support, letting him restyle the interface in a way he couldn't reproduce with userscripts on any competitor.