I grew up using Google (and ask jeeves and yahoo.) In school, google won.
Now, google sucks. It's all ads, AI SEO maxxing, and the work to find useful results has gone up manyfold. I found myself using site:"" to get closer to what I needed.
I tried DDG, and it's more or less the same, but it's like the search engine is conspiring against you to more or less find completely useless results.
I tried kagi, and i love it. I hate that it's 100 searches for the cheapest account, but it gets me right into the thick of my research off the bat, plus searching smallweb has brought my faith back into the internet, and it's AI stuff is useful, insofar that it doesn't get in the way.
DDG is still my standard search tool for "picture of banana" or "WWII jet airplanes" but for "forum discussion 73 magazine article on homebrew superheterodyne receiver from 1980s" im going straight to kagi.
Why y'all going to your fav search engine first to search with another search engine? This is built into chrome and probably Firefox and every other browser
Bangs make searching third-party sites easier. For HN, for example:
!hn by:dredmorbius ddg bangs
(I don't know how to force that to search comments by default, but that's a toggle on the results page.)
Others are image, weather, and Wikipedia searches.
You can share your bang searches with others. Since the syntax is centralised, you're not working through other people's individual search shortcuts.
DDG maintain the bangs and generally update the ones that break. Since more people are effectively testing these all the time, this is more effective than your own ability to keep your own search shortcuts in working order.
My claim isn't that these are necessarily overwhelming advantages. But they are benefits which some of us have noted and appreciate, and show that the concept has more than nil value.
And: DDG have over 13,500 bangs and counting, and you can search for relevant bangs using, of course, the !bang bang search, e.g.,
My usual use case is to search HN comments. Problem is that there doesn't seem to be a way to specify comments on the bang search itself, so you have to toggle the results page option, or click "search for comments" to get the 57 (at this writing) comment hits:
I really wish the bang would default to comment search, as it's a much broader search target. Posts are limited to 80 characters, comments to rather more than that (there is a max comment length, and I've hit it, but it's fairly generous). So your odds of matching term(s) in a comment are higher than for posts.
I don't know how the syncing works for that, but all my custom bangs (which for me includes bangs for Kagi lenses / filters and non search engine sites at this point) sync using my Kagi account which is pretty nice.
Also I use Firefox Focus on mobile, which doesn't have many settings, and I don't think I've seen that features there.
It's 300 searches per month for the cheapest Kagi plan. For me that has been enough so far. Some days I search a lot and then other days almost nothing so on average I never passed the 300/month so far.
Main thing holding me back from even trying it is the mental overhead of having to think about "number of searches per month".
Same as an ISP with a bandwidth limit, even if it's much higher than I'm likely to need, it's not something I'm interested in having to keep track of or worry about.
Just don't think about it. Kagi keeps track of it and they do not charge for anything extra. They will tell you when you reached your limit. At first I also thought I would have to think about and not search for anything unnecessary to keep the usage low, but now I just blast away without thinking about it and I have so far never reached the monthly limit of 300 for the $5 plan.
It's refreshing to not have any ads and know there is no hidden agenda behind the search results.
What turned me off Kagi is that they spent a huge percentage of some recent funding they got on making ridiculously customized overengineered…t-shirts.
Their development process seems to be “just say yes to everything that piques your interest” and so even with their steep pricing I’m fairly sure they’ll run out of money quickly.
This has been my exact experience with DDG. I tried Yandex when somebody posted on here that it had old-school style results, and it was true to a certain degree, but I'm not gonna use some Russian search engine. So I just literally stopped searching for things. The Internet mostly died, for me, when searching got bad; now it's just specific forums and websites that I already know about.
In my opinion, this was all done on purpose. They wanted to ruin free and open access to independent, distributed creations, and keep any traffic into a narrow funnel owned mostly by Black Rock, Vanguard Trust, and State Street Capital, with the eventual goal of frustrating people into purchasing licensed access to AI to get curated and censored access to limited information.
Now, google sucks. It's all ads, AI SEO maxxing, and the work to find useful results has gone up manyfold. I found myself using site:"" to get closer to what I needed.
I tried DDG, and it's more or less the same, but it's like the search engine is conspiring against you to more or less find completely useless results.
I tried kagi, and i love it. I hate that it's 100 searches for the cheapest account, but it gets me right into the thick of my research off the bat, plus searching smallweb has brought my faith back into the internet, and it's AI stuff is useful, insofar that it doesn't get in the way.
DDG is still my standard search tool for "picture of banana" or "WWII jet airplanes" but for "forum discussion 73 magazine article on homebrew superheterodyne receiver from 1980s" im going straight to kagi.