I can't stress how much better Kagi is than Google, I'm a paying user. No more scrolling through tons of ads. Filtering by time and language is great, no more GitHub and Stackoverflow clones in the result.
Thank you, I actually haven't realized how small Kagi still is, given how polished that product already is.
Hated what g! was becoming, so I started using ddg, liked it at first but had to often modify my queries with a g! but I still used it, the experiance was't great, but it somehow worked, then the controversies around ddg started to come out. At the end of the day you gotta keep the lights on, if your users are not your customers then someone else is going to have to help you pay the bills.
Used kagi since it was recommended here on hn. Used it for a week(-ish) and instantly fell in love with it, the lenses feature, the ability to rank search results meant I could block out websites I hated seeing on my search results and boosting the ones I cared about. Now I am a paying customer.
Oh yeh, one more thing, for the past few months I don't remember a single instance of me modifying my queries with !g. Now I promote them every chance I get, I even got called a paid shill on reddit a few weeks back :D .
The CEO and founder of ddg announced on twitter that they will start moderating content on the Russian invasion of Ukraine [1]. While I agree disinformation is a problem, I want my search engine to treat my like an adult, just do your job of retrieving the information I asked for and let me decide what is mis-information and what is not.
It starts with a cause we all can get behind, sometimes its "think of the children", another time it's regulating information from people supporting orcs, and who knows, how do I know things I care about might get suppressed in the future? Stop the nonsese, let me be the judge of what I consume.
The other instance I remember was the whole ms tracking situation[2], if your whole selling point is "Privacy simplified" then do just that without all the nonsese. There were a few others (#duckduckgone) before I stopped using them.
Not a controversy, but my gripe with ddg is whatever they do when I click on a result that puts the title and icon of the target page in my history, but when I click on the link in history it takes me to the ddg search results page, not the actual page.
Eh, ads are not something one has to put up with unless one chooses so, and filtering by language worked well for me with DDG (can’t remember about google, it’s been so long). I do enjoy their actually unique features, though ;)
Some searches with Google have become absolutely unusable, a flood of paywalled quora and random blogs that blabber without answers just to try and sell you a solution to a problem you don't actually have.
Kagi allows you to remove all that trash and actually find what you need.
-- Aside - why dont we have a keyboard key to switch an entire line from ALL CAPS to all caps or to All Caps... (This would be a great key)
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Is there a way something like Kagi can also search google and ddg and ad results to a search then rank the relevant ones based on which ones users click in the results in addition to whatever/wherever Kagi indexes from? (or is that how it works - because the goog crawler is massive and hard to replicate is it not?)
I saw that in the video on the front page. It looks like a killer feature. I use DDG currently and am starting to get annoyed how Wikipedia is almost always the top result for any broad term.
I'm not sure it's a $10/mo killer feature, though.
> Is there a way something like Kagi can also search google and ddg and ad results to a search then rank the relevant ones based on which ones users click in the results in addition to whatever/wherever Kagi indexes from? (or is that how it works - because the goog crawler is massive and hard to replicate is it not?)
They don’t connect any searches/clicks to user accounts. But you can rank sites yourself like this: https://i.imgur.com/Po7mG7Q.png
I believe it does search using multiple other engines (google, DDG, Bing?) and lots of other ways as well (archive.org searches) but for ranking you have to choose to do that yourself
