[traceroute66]

I recently tried Kagi and I struggled to see the value.

For many queries side-by-side with Startpage it delivered the same results word-for-word (sure you get a few sponsored links top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those).

For other things, it was just plain annoying, e.g. "newest $type restaurants in $large_city" half the results on the first page were from 10 years ago (e.g. dated 2014). I mean FFS I put the word "newest" in there !

They seem to have a habit of interespersing very weird Facebook links randomly in the middle of a list of results. For example I was searching for something related to a specific Prometheus function (which I explicitly named in the query, alongside the word prometheus) and Kagi insisted on interspersing the technical results with random links to Facebook pages of companies selling "girlie dresses for proms".

I approached Kagi with an open mind, but having used up the 100 free searches nothing made me say "just shut up and take my money".

[recursive]

> but its no big deal to scroll past those

For some of us it is. If your search engine's revenue model is based on advertising to its users, their relationship is fundamentally adversarial. This affects all of their decisions, in ways that are sometimes hard to identify. Witness the slow decline of google search result ads.

If users are the direct source of revenue, then everyone's interests are aligned.

Also, I, and many like me, value a lack of ads much more highly than you do. Which is fine.

[protimewaster]

I don't think it's necessarily the case that interests are aligned just because users are the direct source of revenue. Many services that rely on users as a direct source of revenue still have interest alignment issues for various reasons.

For example, I don't want to log into or provide payment information to my search provider, because I don't want to voluntarily provide personal information. Compared to Kagi, I can use traditional ad-based search in a relatively anonymous way.

[recursive]

It's not sufficient, but I'd argue it's necessary.

[rvnx]

40 to 60% of users get the free search results, and the comfort of not having ads with a simple "Hide element" extension.

It's hard to beat.

[MostlyStable]

Avoiding the ads doesn't fix the alignment issues. Even without ads, modern google search is dramatically worse than a decade ago, and I'm personally pretty confident it's because their interests and user interests are not well aligned. I don't have to worry about that with Kagi.

[RoyalHenOil]

Customizing your search results is a big part of it. When I tried Kagi, I did not find it to be a huge improvement on Google until I started adjusting the rankings of my search results. Now I find it painful to go back to Google when I use someone else's computer or device.

The other big part of it (for me at least) is seeing more obscure websites in my results. I have had Kagi for a year now, and it has saved me more money than I've spent on it by making it easier to find specific products at lesser-known shops. These lesser-known shops often have really great sales because they are trying to compete against the big names, and Google pretty much only shows me the big names.

[kelnos]

> sure you get a few sponsored links top-3 of Startpage but its no big deal to scroll past those

I get that you don't mind, but for me, I would find that intolerable.