Out of interest, has anyone here been using Kagi? It's a premium search engine, which means it has reasons and resources to not suck, in theory. Kind of interested in trying it, but not sure how good it actually is.
this post was submitted on 13 Sep 2024
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I am somewhat tempted to sign up and give it a shot. DDG is pretty solid for me, but it would be interesting to try a search engine where I'm not the product, it is.
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Check out Kagi. It's a paid search engine. I've been using it almost half a year now and really enjoy it.
What about it is worth paying for?
I think it's a mix of a few things.
The quality is on par with Google unless it's local results. I feel the other search engines just have inferior results, whereas Kagi gets part of their search from Google.
Theres no ads and you have a lot of customization options. It just feels to me overall like what Google should have been.
I like how I can add reddit as a search filter and with one button I can search Reddit instead of having to type site:. I know it's a small thing but is convenient on mobile.
You can pin and rate sites. So you can do things like pin Lemmy or GitHub posts to top of search.
The AI is non intrusive and gives really nice concise info.
Idk. Initially I just paid for a month to see how it feels, now it just feels weird to do search in Google.
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Kagi is simply SearXNG backend with a pretty UI. Nothing it provides is unique or something you cannot get elsewhere for free and most times better.
It literally uses Bing and Google indexes and is functionally no different than DDG except for the ability for you to pay them money to quality control the search results for them, which is extremely dumb because they are essentially making you pay them for you to do a job for them.
Avoid it unless you have money to waste for aesthetics like Apple fanatics.
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Startpage
This one looks really good. I'm not sure how they make money though.
Startpage is good, anonymized, and respects privacy. You will encounter ads and cards, but they can be blocked. Fully usable and functional with or without an account. It is also themeable with a dark mode. Results are pulled from Google, but DDG's results were pulled from Bing and anonymized.
Since I started using it I raaaaarely open Google's search.
Nice this one sounds great! I actually like cards in moderation, just not so many I can't see the results without scrolling.
You can turn those info cards, ads, and some other stuff off in the settings fyi
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Not doubting you here, but I just tried searching for two very different terms on DDG on two different devices (Windows laptop and Android phone) and two different browsers (Firefox and Brave), and I didn't really see any ads or dodgy stuff.
The mobile Firefox version had a couple of main links at the top (they don't look like ads), and some news cards under that. But the links were all relevant. The desktop DDG was super clean, again no ads.
This was without ad blockers enabled too. I also tried it in private mode, and still clean.
What am I missing? Why is my DDG experience so clean compared to yours?
I second this. DDG, Searxng and various LLM are my daily drivers depending on the queries. I don't recognise DDG being bloated with ads like Google. I have adblockers but I put sites like DDG on the whitelist because hey support the good guys.
Is it topical? Regional? Does OP have malware that is transforming the browser document? Is OP searching for niche content and confusing singular domain results for ads? Has DDG shifted owners and doing some tests?
I would like to know more.
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I've been testing other search engines, and I found that SearX/SearXNG and Mojeek both turn up results for smaller websites that Google puts in 50th place for the exact title of the website/page.
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Qwant is something I've been using for the past few months. I've been liking it personally.
If you self host, you could try searxng
Or even just use any public instance found here. Different instances may have different defaults, but under Preferences you can enable/disable whatever search engines you want.
I switched to searx.be a couple of days ago and so far I'm quite happy with the results.