alt Hacker NewsHaven't tried Kagi yet. I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google. As a duckduckgo user honestly i typically find what i want, except I am feeling more and more like i don't recognize / trusts many of the top sites in a result. might be a perfect time to try it.
Replies
N+1 I have paid for Kagi for a couple of years. I describe it as google search back when google search was actually useful.
> I know many people are increasingly frustrated with Google
I’m not sure if this holds true nowadays. I’d say it git pretty bad, but now Gemini summary pretty much covers all of my use cases. And for any meaningful query, it’s straight to ChatGPT/Claude.
Tried them all. When looking for obscure sites, I still find Google to be the best above all. DDG will often miss results, Kagi and Brave will be better but still not have the vast amount of sites indexed like Google does. Also, I'm still surprised to this day that searching "duckdns" on DuckDuckGo doesn't bring up the DuckDNS site -- maybe they have something against other ducks?
As for Google, I typically only use its "Web" search so I skip all the junk Google adds to the `All` tab. With Firefox or Chrome, you can make a custom search engine with `&udm=14` appended, like `https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14` if you want it to be your default search engine.
My workflow (return on success):
1. DDG
2. Google
3. Whichever LLM is closest at hand
4. This is information the world was not meant to know
Kagi is awesome, it's what Google used to be. I tried to switch to DDG, but I found that I had to use the !g option more often than not to get good results. With Kagi, I've never had to do that.
As far as data goes, Kagi often lags behind Google. It will return outdated or irrelevant articles quite often.
However, Google has shat the bed, itself, the room the bed is in, the neighbors and half of the city with the search. Since search no longer returns any semblance of relevant data, but ads and wrong AI summaries.
So for vast majority of use cases I find Kagi much more superior. And in 1 or 2 cases when I'm frustrated with the results I can append `g!` before the query to get the shitty Google results.
The only downside: Apple doesn't let you set a custom search engine to Kagi. And (a very unpleasant surprise for me) neither does Firefox. You need extensions.
Try Kagi. Honestly. It craps on DDG.
A few months ago I stopped paying for kagi and went back to DDG. I started noticing all the top results were AI generated, so I just went back to Kagi yesterday and it is a huge breath of fresh air. So much better!