I’ll go first. I’ve used a lot of search engines, I used duckduckgo for quite some time but found their search results kinda bad. I’m currently using ecosia the search results are similar to ddg’s but at least I’m planting trees, so there’s that.
I’ll go first. I’ve used a lot of search engines, I used duckduckgo for quite some time but found their search results kinda bad. I’m currently using ecosia the search results are similar to ddg’s but at least I’m planting trees, so there’s that.
Kagi. Yes, it’s paid and the pricing structure is really meh, but:
I want to give it a try but it’s hard to justify the cost with limited searches. I don’t want to have to keep track of how many times I’ve searched or second guess if I “really need to search for that”.
I was using DuckDuckGo and it was giving me pretty ‘eh’ results, only marginally better than google on the surface level, but both weren’t really usable for deep older searches. (and ddg starting to add sus ads/promoted) Brave is better, but Kagi has been fantastic when I’ve really needed to find something specific, technical, or very old. I think the best way to come about the pricing structure and limited search results is that I think it’s not supposed to be your only search engine from then on. There are times when you need what kagi gives in terms of producing quality and relevant results, and times you just wanna search “[company name] reviews/is a scam?” that using kagi wouldn’t serve you better than anything else, so it’s more of a tool that you bring out when you aren’t finding what you need with free search engines. On it’s own page it doesn’t try and oversell you on it, they admit that the majority of people don’t need paid search most of the time.
I haven’t approached if it’s an early netflix thing where you could split the bill with others for one login/family plan, that might make it more feasible.
For some reason the thought of a paid search engine has never even crossed by mind before. I’ve been using DDG but this has peaked my curiosity. Thank you.
Edit: The pricing is… very… meh.
It is very meh. But I think if you’re able to, it’s well worth the price. Just don’t get the standard plan. That one is god awful.
To understand the pricing, you need to know how they source the results. While they use their own index, that’s very small. Every search is an API request to both Google and Bing. And they pay for those.
So you’re basically paying for a proxy for Google and Bing search?
No, it’s far more than that. They don’t just bought give you those results, they do their own ranking. The results are far better than either. They also honor stuff like phrase search properly.
There downranking for spammy sites and tracker heavy sites, you can personalize results (block boost or penalize domains) and filter better than other search engines.