[freedomben]

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.

[everforward]

It uses Google's index, among others.

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).

[vunderba]

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.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/ublacklist

First two extensions I always install on a new computer are uBlockOrigin and uBlackList.

[vvanders]

The "forum" lens is worth it just for the cost of admission alone. Cuts through all the AI generated SEO garbage in an incredible effective way.

[ablation]

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.