I love being able to uprank, downrank, pin or blacklist specific domains/sites for my personal results. That alone makes it worth it. I also find the search results to be as good or better than Google. Once my personal ranking kicks in it's not even close.
Being able to personalize your own search is truly the killer feature, though, in a couple of ways.
The first is as you point out: being able to "edit your own algorithm" is really nice. I don't have to try to "train" Google's algorithm to show the results I want, and it's very easy to say "I never want to see this site in my results again". I'm still shocked Google doesn't have that feature even as some kind of client-side Javascript.
The second is Lenses. It's so obvious in hindsight that a singular algorithm is insufficient for search. Nobody wants or needs their searches for porn to impact their searches for technical documentation, or vice versa. There are more nuanced examples, but that's the most obvious (also, I don't think Kagi indexes NSFW content or at least I haven't seen any).
I've had this feature for years by using the uBlacklist Firefox extension. With a single click after a search, you can permanently block a domain from coming up in your Google search results.
And then gives you the astroturfed forum responses from “digital marketers” present in just-big-enough-to-matter communities. The rot is inescapable, just a different flavour.
>And unlike DDG, the quality of the results is actually great.
Any chance you can expand on this?
I've used DDG for years and find the results great, but maybe we just query for different things. Is there any specific topics that you find DDG is bad at but Kagi is good at?
I'm a paying Kagi user. I don't think that I can give a clear example or explanation of why they are better, partly because it's been a long time since I used DDG, and I gave up pretty quickly. The one thing I can say is that, for the short time I was using DDG, I found myself doing a search, and then in most cases, immediately redoing the search using the !g, because the DDG results were bad, and even though I am also dissatisfied with google results these days, they were better. Kagi has the same functionality, but I find myself almost never using it.
That being said, if you personally are happy with your DDG results, then I'd say you should probably stick with it. Kagi _might_ be better for you than DDG, but if you aren't actively dissatisfied (the way I was with Google and everything else), then the room for improvement is smaller. Might be worth using their free tier (which is 100 queries per month I think) just to test out some side by side searches though.
I personally switched away from DDG when they started removing results that were errantly removed by Bing. Since Bing is their upstream results provider, I didn't feel like I was getting away from the overreach of big tech, so I went to Kagi where they don't solely rely on upstream providers as they have their own crawler and such. The fact that they offer other great features like filtering results, and integrated AI makes it worth switching and paying for. Plus, I hate ads. Targeted or not. So I'm willing to pay to make that go away for a quality service.
I tried using DDG many times in the past. I found myself using the !g constantly, because I wasn't finding what I needed in the DDG results. After a while, I started preemptively adding !g, because I assumed DDG would fail me, as it often did.
With Kagi, I haven't had that. It finds what I need and surfaces things that Google didn't. On the one or two occasions I've had trouble and jumped to Google out of desperation, I also didn't find what I was looking for there... so I guess an answer didn't exist.
For sites I don't like, I can block them from my results, or rank things higher/lower. I can make my own custom !bangs and shortcuts, instead of being stuck with what I'm given. While I haven't used Google since they launched their AI features, I can say I have really enjoyed Kagi's AI responses to questions, and that each line of the response is referenced so I can check out the source (not sure if they all do this or not... I can only compare it to ChatGPT, which does not).
It's always a better use of your time to try something and see if you like it yourself, than asking strangers. Especially when there's no inconvenience or cost of trying. How would anybody here know what your preferences are in a search engine?
I'm not a Kagi user and don't have any hard info. But I find DDG frustrating with searches. It tends to do fine enough with technical searches, like software/programming searches that I make. It's other random searches that it often fails with. DDG will fail to find the nuance in my search query, the results will flat out not be what I'm looking for, so as a sibling comment mentioned I'll fall back to using !G with some regularity.
I've stopped using Google due to their captcha being so frequent and frustrating. I don't want to spend 60+ seconds answering 6 captchas purely because I use Firefox with privacy settings/extensions.
No Tor, no VPN. Nothing too far out of the ordinary.
I usually search in a private tab, enhanced tracking protection set to strict, uBlock with most default filters enabled.
Oh and a "Google Search Fixer" extension because the make the UI much worse for Firefox. Maybe it's one of my extensions, but DDG never traps me in captcha hell.
I would say that most alternate search engines don’t perform as well as google. Kagi performs better primarily because you can downrank or flat out block certain domains and also upvote helpful resources so that those domains are more likely to appear in your results. Also there are no ads so you get just the results and nothing else. When you sign up you even get a list of most blocked and downvoted sites from other users like quora is top blocked so it’s easy to improve your results. They also pay for access to certain databases and you get access to little things like court records when you search for people by name or other little improvements. I don’t think privacy is the primary reason to use it at all.
Honestly it’s awesome I use a software at work so I upvote that site and block the site of the competing software for example so I get the correct help guide. I don’t understand why google doesn’t offer many of these features.
It does its job: provides web results relevant to the query. At the moment it has acceptable signal-to-noise ratio (quality varies per-query, but it has higher chances of useful links than web spam), which is why people tend to say it's good.