Deth

Fitness and everything else

So Far So Good With Kagi Search

I haven’t kept the fact that I’ve been becoming more and more frustrated with Google’s search results over the past decade. Some time ago, I discovered and switched to DuckDuckGo and that worked okay. Every so often it was better than Google, and other times it was worse. It wasn’t exactly a rare occurrence that I’d have to use the !g to fall back to searching google. It’s a great to have that available and all, but I did wish I didn’t need it so frequently. If I’d have to guess a frequency of using it, I would estimate maybe a third of my queries.

Back in Early December, I discovered Kagi and signed up for the paid subscription right away since it was giving me better results. It’s only $10 a month which may seem expensive for something that you’re used to being “free” but nothing’s free. With Google, you’re the product. With Kagi, you’re the customer. I am able to pay it and don’t mind paying for something that I do and will continue to use daily.

With me being the customer of Kagi at least in theory their incentives should be to give me the best search results possible. Google’s incentives are to show me ads. Most of the SEO spammy sites are loaded down with ads. I’m not saying that Google ranks them higher due to the ads that are likely sold by Google themselves, but the incentive isn’t there to push them down.

That was off-topic a bit, but I’ll get back to what really matters to me. Over the past month that I’ve been using exclusively Kagi Search, I’ve only had to fall back on Google a handful of times at the most. I did it mostly for Google Maps stuff. That’s only because I’m more used to using Google Maps. It’s just visually better for me.

Other than the maps thing, I can’t think of a time that I’ve had to use the !g in the query to search Google. Kagi has given me the result that matched what I was searching for. It’s been pretty refreshing not to have to scroll down through obvious SEO spam after SEO spam result. Sure, some spam gets through but not nearly as much as on Google where if you’re not clicking the Wikipedia link you may as well just skip to the second or third page.

Generally, Kagi has been giving me results that are relevant to what I am searching for in the top few results. I don’t need to fish through the paid results, either.

For me to keep using it and paying for it, I don’t think it has to be better than Google for search results. It has to be not worse that Google. It’s not as if I have to use it exclusively. Choices and competition are good. Google has been too dominant for too long.

I definitely recommend taking a look at this search engine to see if it works well for you.