[jchw]

I typically use search engines not to answer questions but to search for things, like for example, maybe I want to find an old Qt Quarterly because something on HN made me think about it, or I'm looking for really deep MSDN documents about Text Services Framework to research something about how IME works on Windows. My biggest issue with Kagi is that whatever indices it seems to pull from seem less deep than both Bing and Google. Now, I could be wrong and maybe it's actually bigger or it uses one of them for some of its results, but my experience was that I was able to get results on DDG when Kagi couldn't return any for a given query.

Generally, I find that Google is a bigger index with a better ranking algorithm on top of it. However, DDG/Bing do generally seem to have an impressive index, and one of the biggest differentiators for most search engines that are not Google is that most search engines that are not Google will generally allow you to search for what you want to search for. I feel like with Google, it's very difficult to force it to always include all of the exact terms I'm specifying; it wants to search for something else. Sometimes I'm not even sure it's able to differentiate between two similar looking terms!

With all of this said, Kagi definitely was nice in terms of the fact that it felt like it was doing a good job of searching for what I asked for and an alright job ranking them. I gave it my best shot. But, alas, I never got to the point where I felt comfortable not searching Google afterwards. Even as much as Google pisses me off, it feels like their index is just far and away the largest, and it's not even really close.