I’ve been using duckduckgo for years now with no issues, but today I opened it and realized there were no longer any search results before scrolling. It was all ads/info cards. So I guess I’m looking for a replacement. Any suggestions?
Related: anyone know if there’s a way in the Adnauseum Firefox extension to hide ads on a specific trusted site? I like their goal of not punishing ads following the do not track standard, but DDG has crossed a threshold and I now want to blacklist them specifically.
I mean, Kagi is just the best. I remember trying it like a year ago and I just forgot to switch back to anything else. It’s that good.
Out of interest, has anyone here been using Kagi? It’s a premium search engine, which means it has reasons and resources to not suck, in theory. Kind of interested in trying it, but not sure how good it actually is.
I’ve been using Kagi for the better part of a year. I find it removes about 2/3 of the time and effort between search and goal. There are a lot of very simple quality of life things that every search should have (and would have if not for user tracking).
Some people have fairly said that paid search is inherently privacy unfriendly. You have to log in to use it. That doesn’t really bother me, and if it doesn’t bother you, it’s great to use a quality search where you are not the product.
That’s the kicker for me. It’s possible they log your entire search history which is disturbing.
I looked into it before I started using it like a year ago. They count the number of searches but claim to not hold actual search queries. I don’t have a citation handy (it has been a year…) but even if that’s untrue (which I don’t think it is, but hypothetically) and they were found to be using it to tweak their engine, meh? I search for memes, accounts for art/porn, games/reviews, etc. I’m not searching for my home address or anything of interest or value. “hey, the horny furry searched for more horny furry stuff” is like “water is still wet, more at 10”.
This is a super low-important possibility, imo.
I couldn’t live without it. Love being able to up/down-rate my results. I’ve been trying to de-google my life but search was always the one thing I couldn’t give up. DuckDuckGo being Bing results just didn’t have the quality. Kagi’s results are S tier. As I understand it, they’re sourced in a privacy friendly way from Google and then they apply your preferences on top of them. Definitely went in skeptical and now I can’t imagine not having Kagi.
I tried Kagi and found the results to be significantly less helpful than Google. Searches for local businesses, open source libraries, and Canadian history missed useful sites that Google provided.
I guess I’m an outlier, because other people seem to have a good time with it.
OP, please reword the title to be a question. Thanks.
Check out Kagi. It’s a paid search engine. I’ve been using it almost half a year now and really enjoy it.
Kagi is simply SearXNG backend with a pretty UI. Nothing it provides is unique or something you cannot get elsewhere for free and most times better.
It literally uses Bing and Google indexes and is functionally no different than DDG except for the ability for you to pay them money to quality control the search results for them, which is extremely dumb because they are essentially making you pay them for you to do a job for them.
Avoid it unless you have money to waste for aesthetics like Apple fanatics.
I think it’s a mix of a few things.
The quality is on par with Google unless it’s local results. I feel the other search engines just have inferior results, whereas Kagi gets part of their search from Google.
Theres no ads and you have a lot of customization options. It just feels to me overall like what Google should have been.
I like how I can add reddit as a search filter and with one button I can search Reddit instead of having to type site:. I know it’s a small thing but is convenient on mobile.
You can pin and rate sites. So you can do things like pin Lemmy or GitHub posts to top of search.
The AI is non intrusive and gives really nice concise info.
Idk. Initially I just paid for a month to see how it feels, now it just feels weird to do search in Google.
