Are the results really that much better? I use DDG and paying $10/mo for a search engine seems like a tall order, especially when I don't know if Kagi can be that much less broken than Google.
They are also better than Google search. When I was using DDG, I still used Google from time to time if DDG's results were not helpful. After I switched to Kagi, I did the same at first but soon realized that when Kagi gives you bad results, Google's are even worse.
I was using DDG exclusively for over a year. It gives way better results than Google. Recently I switched to Kagi, for its ability to prioritize my favorite sites, and block others. I'm paying $5 a month for it, and I've honestly not been this confident in the search results I'm getting for a long long time.
Kagi is in fact better for me very frequently. I customized it to my liking and it shows better results than Google. Sure, I would be able to find the same content on Google, but that would require using keywords for site or file type.
With DDG I had anxiety that I am not finding the right results and would double check on Google too often. With Kagi this anxiety is gone - that’s a phenomenal accomplishment in my opinion.
Kagi seems cool to me and I appreciate what they’re doing but I’ve been using DDG for years now and find myself falling back to Google less and less. It has improved quite a bit for my personal use and I can’t imagine spending $100/year+ for search. I’d be game if it was a little less.
I use Kagi. Probably not better than Google, but often with less junk. It's much better than DDG. The extra features are nice, as are the customizations (boost specific domains, etc.) I thought I'd be !g-ing to find things on Google, but I rarely do, and I'm constantly researching niche stuff. When I do try !g, I generally find that Google doesn't have the results, either. Kagi also seems to do better with really old results that Google has memory holded.
But I used DDG for a few years prior and rarely ever used Google. I think DDGs results are subjective in that for some people they are better or as good than Google's.
I used DDG which was slightly better; but for a couple of months, I've switched to kagi, and it's been a revelation. It's much better than both, it's google from 15 years ago. Drawback is that unlimited searches needs a subscription (10$/months). But I personally think it worth for the time and focus gains.
I mostly use DDG. Kagi results are comparable. When DDG fails I sometimes resort to Google. I can't use Kagi routinely with just 100 queries but I try it sometimes. It is subject to the same spurious results as the others afaict. And I haven't yet seen it find anything that the others missed.
Kagi is the first alternative search engine that I actually use regularly instead of Google.
I used DDG for years, but more than half my queries ended up being prepended with !g because their results just weren't very good. With Kagi, I fall back on Google maybe once a month, and usually Google doesn't end up finding anything better.
I'm a happy paying user... I almost never have to !g. I tried DDG before kagi, and it just seemed like a worse version of google to me. I definitely prefer the kagi results.
I’m very glad there’s a market for paid premium search engines and based on the comments here Kagi is doing fantastic.
However I experimented last week by running all my searches (work and personal) in DDG (my default) and then also in Kagi. And basically they either both had the best result first, or sometimes second or third. Definitely not a $10/month difference for me.
If you find the quality of ddg results lacking, I know I did, they are basically just a bing wrapper after all, then give Kagi a shot. It's a subscription service search engine, but in my opinion it's more than worth the cost, especially for programming queries
This has not been my experience with Kagi. I used DDG full time for years, but, got increasingly disappointed with the results. Paid for Kagi and, omg, I couldn't be happier. It's fast, it just works, it returns more useful results than either Google or DDG.
I've been a Kagi customer since the beta, I'm still happy to pay for the privacy and for certain UX improvements they have, for instance being able to give higher or lower weight to different websites in search results. I do not think the quality of their search is any better than DDG or Google. If I am being honest, it's actually worse for a lot of things, if you don't factor in that you can block bad websites without a plugin.
Even paying for Kagi, I still go back to Google for any really open-ended searches where the search engine's ML can actually be helpful. For known-item searches ("fandango showtimes Seattle"), or simple searches ("pumpkin bread recipe") which are fully 90%+ of what I search for, Kagi is just fine, and they aren't after my identity (just my money).
Is there killer feature that Kagi has or is it just a marginal improvement over Google? I’ve tried a few of my last technical Google searches and got practically identical results. So I’m wondering if there’s more. Is there $120/yr worth of more here?
Also, if anyone finds it substantially better, could you give some example queries on which it does better?
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