Comment by al_borland
2 days ago
I had a similar experience with DDG. I felt like I had to add “!g” to everything, which doesn’t actually move one away from Google, it just creates friction.
Kagi, however, has been a different experience for me. I haven’t felt the need to go to Google at all. If I can’t find it with Kagi, I’m confident I won’t find it with Google either. There have also been several times where I was on an outage call with a double dozen people all looking for answers to some issue. Everyone was coming up empty with Google, and I was able to find something that solved the issue pretty quickly with Kagi.
+1 for Kagi. It's been my daily driver for 2.5 years and I have no complaints.
Yep, I came to this thread looking for excuses to switch to a different free non-Google search but everywhere you go there are Kagi recommendations. I've been loving it for the past year.
Kagi + Perplexity have all but eliminated the need for Google search for me
Isn't that because Kagi is just filtered Google results?
That’s what startpage does. Kagi has a lot of sources.
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...
Kagi _does_ use Google results, but they also have their own index, as well as search filters to curate _your_ search result. Makes it easier to cut out the garbage.
I had a mostly bad experience with Kagi, but I have to say I miss the account-level domain blocking.
I’ve also been using Kagi for the past ~2 years. At first I would always also search Google to see if I was missing out on better results, but after a couple of months I no longer bothered because Kagi did better 99% of the time. It’s worth the cost, I’d keep it over Netflix if I had to choose.
TLDR Kagi is what Google would have been if they had kept improving instead of transitioning to enshitifying ~10yrs ago.
It only took me a couple of weeks to go from "I can't ever imagine paying for search" to "I will never use free search again". Kagi is the best bang for buck of any subscription I pay for.