[darby_nine]

> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.

It's been more than a decade since google results were distinguishable from bing results. Both spam you with commercial crap.

> This may be so, but there is no competition that's even 10% better than Google.

Kagi is much better than google. I have no clue what their baseline search quality is like, but I don't care because I can customize it enough to far outstrip quality that google can provide as google refuses to provide (or has actively disabled) the tools necessary to make search useful, like allowing the user to blacklist domains against all their searches or prioritize certain domains. Which is dumb, because how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?

What we really need is an engine that excludes all commercial results, and an option to exclude sites with ads. That'd be a goldmine.

[fragmede]

> how could they know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?

The tracking javascript, if you have it enabled, undoubtedly looks at the links on the search results page you clicked. If you search, go to the first result, and immediately bounce back to the page and try the second result, the first result gets down-ranked.

[Diti]

> how could [Google] know what sort of results i value if they refuse to ask?

They don’t care about the end-user of their search engines. You are not the client – advertisers are. All Google care about is to present search results that maximize revenue for sponsored results.

[lillecarl]

Kagi is better at searching internationally or maybe nationally, but local search is still dominated by Google. Looking for bars, restaurants, corner shops, grocerers and such is Google territory in my experience.

[bad_user]

We must live in a different world because for me, Bing's results have always been completely unusable. As a consequence, DuckDuckGo's results as well, although I understand that it must work for certain types of users located in certain countries; otherwise I can't understand how anyone would use it.

I just logged into Kagi, and searched for “restaurants”. Kagi can see my country because their UI says so, yet it gave me “top 10 restaurants in Groningen Province” (Netherlands), as the first result and the second result was “top 10 restaurants in Barcelona”. And I don't live in the Netherlands or Spain.

I also searched for a programming question, an issue I recently had, with the query “slick breaks binary compatibility”. Google gave me fresh discussions describing the issue, whereas Kagi gave me a GitHub issue from 2021 that described issues with the previous major version.

I did not cherry-pick these searches.

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Speaking of, Kagi doesn't have their own index, they just use Bing's API, enhanced with results from other sources, much like what DuckDuckGo does; and like DDG they tend to be disingenuous about it.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

What in the world are people paying for is a complete mystery to me, but YMMV.

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So, again, I'm asking for that one competitor that's 30% better than Google.

[Marsymars]

Conversely, I often find Google's local focus to be counter-productive when I want to search for the most relevant sources in the world (for physical things) or on the internet (for virtual things) and Google insists on giving me local examples of the physical thing or local providers of the virtual thing, neither of which I have interest in.