I used Kagi for almost exactly a month and hit 100 searches. And it’s… fine? I think it’s a huge compliment that I never felt the need to swap back to Google, but I’m not sure I got anything better than Google. I need to really think about if I’m willing to pay for a lateral quality move.

@jsonbecker I went for 6 months on Kagi, before returning to DuckDuckGo. Another 6 months later I am back on Kagi. I can’t clearly say what pulled me back? I think it was a sense, true or otherwise, that I was using a service that felt cleaner to me in its ethos of operation…and sometimes in its display of search results as well.

@jsonbecker like you, Kagi has been fine for me too. Hasn’t knocked my socks off, but I don’t need it to. I need to return results and get outta my way. Which it does perfectly.

The reason I continue to be subscribed is that I loath the way Google is going with all the AI nonsense to keep people from going to sites, and DDG (what I used before) has too many ads. Relevant ads, but too many of them, and they use Bing under the hood.

The other reason is just to keep some competition and diversity in the search market. Everything is Google or Bing and it’s just as crap as the phone situation.

@jsonbecker In my experience the results are better than Google, mostly due to the ability to rank sites up or down. (And I guess I’d call not having ads “better” as well.) However, I’d be happy to pay for the same search quality as Google, but no ads and “not Google”.

I used DDG before Kagi, and found myself having do go to Google (!g) quite often. Never with Kagi.

@alanralph I didn’t even find the site rank feature and I’m not even sure how I’d use it. If I knew the sites to rank I wouldn’t be searching?

@kevq to be honest, Google’s aggressive push to their own app versus browser search is my biggest annoyance at the moment. But not sure it’s that level yet.

@jsonbecker The biggest thing for me is the personalized search results. You can raise, lower or block websites depending on what you want to see. The lenses are pretty cool too. Definitely not life changing stuff but I keep finding it more useful the more I mess with it.

@grubz I didn’t even find the site rank feature and I’m not even sure how I’d use it. If I knew the sites to rank I wouldn’t be searching?

@jsonbecker it kinda works out best if you use it as you go along lol like if you keep seeing sites you don’t like in your searches then you can click the little shield next to the result and lower or block it. Or if you want websites you read a lot to get priority you can raise it for them.

@jsonbecker Yeah, that’s fair!

For instance, I’ve de-ranked Quora and Pintrest, and up-ranked Reddit and sources I like.

I also really like the search bangs, and have also created some custom ones. I also sometimes use the lenses.