I see a lot of recommendations for kagi, but no mention of brave search - specifically the (beta) feature called “goggles”. Afaiu it’s a blend of kagi’s “lenses” and the site ranking in search results.
Tbh, I can’t really compare brave search to kagi, since I never used kagi (though I’m using Orion - webkit based browser from the same dev and love it). Afaik, brave search is using its own index, thus making the results somehow limited and inferior to kagis.
Just wanted to throw some (free) alternative here that works for me. :)
* Note that Brave search, despite privacy oriented, is still ad funded and there was few controversies about brave’s (browser) privacy in the past. (if that’s relevant for you)
Kagi. You have to pay - but it prioritises based on content, not ads, and it lets you pin / emphasise / deemphasise / block sites according to your needs.
(No connection with kagi.com except being a very satisfied user)
Google has been inundated with SEO spam, and sometimes I want current things so LLMs don't work that well. One example is I was buying a ... wait, actually I was putting together some examples for you to compare Kagi (I am an unlimited subscriber) to Google directly, and none of them work now. My Google results for things like "best running shoes 2024" or things like that returned basically the same results as Kagi, pushing sites like Reddit and Wirecutter and REI blog and other known-good blogs to the top. Tried this in Private Browsing as well.
This is definitely a departure because when I subscribed to Kagi a couple months ago, all of my Google results for similar searches were SEO spam blogs filled with Amazon affiliate links that look like they had just sucked some Amazon reviews automatically into some poor facade to generate affiliate revenue.
These results were a surprise to me. Not sure what changed.
I imagine what changed is that Kagi started getting traction on site like here and some managers at google actually did something about it.
My own test "voynich illuminated manuscript" which used to give nothing but pintrest spam on google. Now there is just one result from pintrest in google and pretty much every result in Kagi is from pintrest.
There is an academic tab which seems interesting. I will give it a try later.
https://search.brave.com/help/goggles
There is a list (search) of public goggles: https://search.brave.com/goggles
The goggles itself are just text files with basic syntax and can be hosted on e.g. github gist. (though you have to publish it to brave)
https://github.com/brave/goggles-quickstart/blob/main/goggle...
Tbh, I can’t really compare brave search to kagi, since I never used kagi (though I’m using Orion - webkit based browser from the same dev and love it). Afaik, brave search is using its own index, thus making the results somehow limited and inferior to kagis. Just wanted to throw some (free) alternative here that works for me. :)
* Note that Brave search, despite privacy oriented, is still ad funded and there was few controversies about brave’s (browser) privacy in the past. (if that’s relevant for you)
* I’m not affiliated with Brave in any way.