I've given up on Google's ability to keep its products useful. For search, I switched to Kagi a few weeks back and haven't had to use Google for anything since.
I was using ddg as default for quite a while, and it sucked. I was constantly discovering that it was missing things that I knew existed, plus it's still got all the same ad problems as google (ignore what you asked for and give you whatever someone else paid to give you).
I started seeing people mention kagi in other threads about google here.
After seeing many mentions, and all positive, and the sales pitch made sense (you are the customer instead of the product), I tried it.
That was months ago and I haven't felt any desire to cancel yet.
There was a small desire to cancel initially because their pricing tiers at the time meant I actually had to care how many queries I made, to figure out what tier I needed, which was super agrevating. But just a few weeks later they changed their plans and although my rate went up a little, I no longer have to think about queries, and I get both myself and my wife. No longer agrevated.
That was the only hint of a wish to cancel, and it no longer exists.
I'm not even using most of it's coolest features yet like lenses and personal filters or ai. Just the basic search.
Besides, Kagi actually shows you results for the -exact- query you enter. It does not replace your query with whatever it thinks you want. Kagi will respect quotes and Boolean operators and other advanced features that google, DDG, et al simply ignore.
I find it nearly impossible to find anything on DDG because it's so aggressive about just straight up ignoring my query to show me something else. Kagi will quite simply give you anything in the index matching your query or nothing at all. You know, like how a search query is supposed to work.
Same here, and I haven't looked back. Totally worth the monthly fee.
I especially like the ability to block things from appearing in search results, like those pesky AI generated web pages that simply regurgitate other websites poorly, or Wikipedia 'clones'.
Ah, nice, I was wondering how I was going to go about making a global setting filtering out results from the likes Reddit : sounds like exactly what I was looking for, going to try it out, thanks !
