Still, give Kagi a chance. I don't work for them, I don't have friends who work for them, I'm just a guy who uses Kagi and will never look back. It isn't expensive and it's SO worth it.
I tried it for two months and it was good, but not that much better that I'd spend $10/mo on it. The results were basically about the same as DDG. I can't really relate to all the praise I see about it.
However, I do have to say that, when I was looking for a very specific post, I spent around twenty minutes on Google and DDG and they came back with trash, whereas Kagi found it right away. In that one instance it was, indeed, fantastic.
I don't feel I have enough ground truth to know how good Kagi's search is in absolute terms (eg. there are plenty of searches where I still just "fail to find" and I don't know if it's my fault or theirs), I just know that I get less "junk" results with it than with DDG by far. With the additional ability to customize results and filters, I'd say it's a good product and it's worth a small subscription fee.
The quality of all free search is just bad. Kagi, even when it fails, is basically the difference between me looking for something or just giving up and deciding it's not worthwhile. Kagi's not magic-tier like early Google was - it's basically just the only modern web search engine.
“fail to find” is one of my favorite aspects of Kagi. When I get that message, I know I need to adjust my search terms. In contrast, Google wants to show me something even if there are no good results, but when it’s just junk, that wastes my time.
If you forget it's not Google, I don't want to sign up. I want something that reminds me all the time that it's not Google, mainly by its ability to actually find the things I search for.
I'm not sure what they mean. I have mine tuned to the point that I can immediately tell when I accidentally google something because the results are so shockingly bad.
Kagi is REALLY good at giving you the ability to filter out the type of results you never want to see.
My main problem is that I don't so much have results I never want to see, as I want to be able to get results from blogs and small sites, the articles that are really interesting.
Google never shows you anything any more from sites that aren't in the top 100 sites by traffic, and many of my searches don't fit that pattern.
Kagi does better, but there isn't a "downrank all the low quality spam" option.
The only thing that reminds me it’s not Google is when I search for a place I don’t get a good map that then allows me to route to the place. Still use Google for that.
For me there are plusses and minuses. It doesn't push ads, but it doesn't seem quite so good at picking out phrases in the query. So I will search for something and then have to go back and quote the phrases
The strange thing is that kagi gets most of its search results from other providers like brave, bing and I believe even Google. It should be able to find those things.
I use SearXNG by the way. Kagi is better but I like the way I can configure SearXNG.
Try looking for your a local Thai restaurant in your area. Kagi doesn’t profile you so it doesn’t know where you are, so any local searches involve adding a keyword or doing the search a second time with !g.
I just tried it on Kagi and it suggested a Yelp link for restaurants in McKinney TX which is nowhere near where I am.
Google uses what it knows about you as context — which arguably many folks here are against— but it does get me the right results in one go.
I just looked and I can't find any option to localize results more specifically than "United States." I'm not finding anything in a KB search either. If the option is there, it has really poor discoverability.
I love the service, but poor local results is definitely one of its weak points and basically the only reason I ever fall back to Google anymore.
Ah ok that explains a lot. I use a lot of privacy protection when I use any Google features (like running them in a separate Firefox container so it can't see other web activity). So I'm used to specifying that already.
Been using it for a week and it is so nice to not have to your results cluttered by marketing bs. I'm faster at work as well because I find actually relevant informational.
I'd love to still use it, alas they've partnered with Brave - which made my stop immediately after hearing that - partnering with a crypto+advertising company - no thanks. It might still be the best option of the bunch, which is sad.
It seems they've redacted pretty much everything related to that, and any search sources for that matter. Had to join the discord to even see someone talk about this;
