Yup, been using Kagi for pretty much all of my searches for like 6 months I think. No regrets so far, just better search results and less ads and tracking. The money is a pittance compared to lots of other things I do.
Google was a directory of Stack Overflow for me, then ChatGPT but mostly Claude, and very recently DeepSeek replaced and augmented those knowledge gathering functions. Search Engines are the past.
I have had trouble searching for blogs/sites older than a few years, in particular with image search with all the AI-generated crap that floods the internet now. The same search query in kagi gave me the results i was looking for in the first row which convinced me to do the switch. Otherwise before kagi I was going with google/startpage (uses google index). I tried DDG/bing some point but it was horrible compared to google.
I like to ask complicated questions, where keywords are insufficient. Google first removed search predicates, making this challenging. Now their results quality is abysmal.
I'm not a fan of OpenAI because of their controversial behavior, but ChatGPT does a great job answering my questions. I can then typically search from there if I need more info.
Kind of surprised how high up Google was in the list with the demographics we have here on HN. The majority of posts I see about search engines are pretty much exclusively bashing on Google for being garbage.
Pleasantly surprised to see how many votes there are for Kagi though as a Kagi user.
DuckDuckGo is my default search engine, but I do find myself using !g many a times because DDG isn’t good enough to beat Google at everything. I’ve heard good things about Kagi here, but its pricing is out of reach, considering multiple people need it in a household.
I pay for Kagi, but while the results are generally good enough, they aren't great. I've tweaked the settings recently so I hope I see a lot less crap, especially SO scraped content.
I'm really starting to like Perplexity. I was relating an anecdote about it earlier today.
I was trying to answer an obscure question about the meaning of something in Linux's /proc filesystem. Whatever I entered into DDG or Google, I just got hits where someone had posted a copy of the file into a forum post, so it hit all the search terms, but the discussion wasn't actually about my topic.
Perplexity understood the question, and answered it... dead wrong! But its fake "citation" links led directly to several pages where people really were discussing my topic, and they answered my question.
I don't prefer any of them really. I just find DDG the least aggravating. My ideal search engine would be simpler and when I tell it I'm looking for a term it would only return pages which actually include that term in the visible text.
Yep, none of the search engines are good at that. You might be able to configure your browser to automatically wrap your query behind quotes by using /search?q="%s".
I find Gemini to be the worst of the AI tools. meta.ai for me has been the best for most things. chatgpt is also good if you aren't constrained by the last date it's been updated on the free version.
The web is much better content-wise than it was 10 years ago. Google, the web indexer, is now trash with ads and can't bring the best of the web anymore, like it would do 10 years ago.
Kagi has all the bangs possible and imaginable, and you can configure new bangs.
But I barely use them, Kagi results by themselves are already great.
And optional LLM summary of results (either by clicking or by ending the query with a "?") is super fast and great specially when you're searching for some easy thing like "how to crop a video in ffmpeg" or "how to do a ternary in kotlin".
Google is like capitalism. It sucks, but it's the best we got.
It's been decades, I can literally feel the cheap quality of results from anything other than Google. It's like holding that cheaper looseleaf that you can see through kind of.
This is not longer true. Try the most used search engines in the poll and you will likely find an alternative with less ad supported links and content.
I use Brave Search exclusively after migrating from DuckDuckGo a year ago or so, and I'm very satisfied. I didn't like that DDG relied on the Bing index, and the ads were starting to get a bit intrusive for me.
Brave's integrated LLM can be a bit annoying for how it reflows the page, but it can be disabled with a cookie and frankly it's been pretty helpful.
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