[brightball]

I’ve given week at a time committed tries to several other search engines at this point.

I tried Kagi, DDG, Bing and Brave Search. I was surprised that I kept getting good results from Brave. Still using it and generally don’t need to look elsewhere for most searches.

The others were more of a mixed bag.

[vic-traill]

> I was surprised that I kept getting good results from Brave

Agreed. I'm expecting the Brave Index to let me down almost every time I use it, however it does a pretty good job.

I don't find the same results, but I see good results.

[devin]

Dedicated Kagi user here. It is extremely rare that I !g or use another engine. Not affiliated with them in any way, but I like to plug them when I can as I really enjoy a model that isn't ad-supported. It's a great product IMO.

[fcoury]

Came here to post about Kagi, have been using them almost exclusively accross all my devices, alongside the Orion browser. Happy customer and zero affiliation as well.

[brightball]

I enjoyed Kagi too. I think it has a lot of promise fwiw.

[AlotOfReading]

DDG and brave have been my default search engines for the past couple years. Despite that, only 2 of my last 10 or so searches weren't followed up with !g.

Take the last search ("bronze patina thickness"), where I wanted to know how thick a typical bronze patina is. The first brave result is a hardware store in Spokane (not even my state!) that sells door latches. The rest of the page is SEO content about watches.

The first result on Google links a paper and the results excerpt tells me 40-50um, up to 70um with prolonged exposure. The performance still isn't close for me despite the clear decline in Google search quality over the years.

[knoebber]

Results from https://kagi.com/search?q=bronze+patina+thickness

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patina

2. https://www.adamsbronze.com/bronze-patinas/

3. https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/materials-science/patin...

3a. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S23524...

4. https://www.corrosionpedia.com/important-facts-you-might-not...

5. https://www.accurateimageinc.com/CutMetals/Finish_CutBrnzPat...

[kevin_thibedeau]

DDG has been falling down in the past week with "no results" showing up frequently for trivial searches.

[lcampbell]

Are you using the no-javascript version (“HTML” version), by any chance? If so, you might find the “fully-featured” version has better^W results, at the cost of requiring Javascript and all that entails.

[AlbertCory]

Since you've seen me elsewhere in this thread, you might have pegged as "google fanboy."

Not a bit of it. I go out of my way to use DDG and it's almost always adequate. I said "almost."

I haven't tried the others you mentioned.

[wizofaus]

I suspect those who find the alternatives effective aren't using search engines the way I and many other users are: asking a specific question to which there is a definitive answer that we expect Google to know. In almost every case I ask such a question, Google comes up with the goods, whereas the others (Brave especially) often do not, or at best the answer is buried somewhere in one of the first few pages found.

Edit: I just signed up for and tried Kagi. Strangely it seems to do well for searches based on my current physical location (despite never explicitly granting it permission to make use of that) but if I qualify my questions with "in America", not so well. But definitely better than DDG/Brave.

[Kuinox]

Your IP give away your current location.