Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.
Yep, this. I was delighted they implemented this simple yet powerful idea. I don't even remember when I have needed to go to a second page of search results in Kagi and spammy clone sites which copy stack exchange verbatim are banned into oblivion where they belong. Fuck up once doing that shit, and you are forever out of my search results.
And then there is the very handy assistant, that I can jump into using follow-up questions to the quick AI queries one can choose to use or not to use by appending a "?". Again a simple idea, which empowers the user.
My ongoing concern with Kagi is they always seem to be focused on sidequests like their Orion browser and their LLM-powered Translate tool. Maybe that's interesting for some people, but I can't help but feel like I just want a damn search engine than works.
Yeah, that's the thing for me: filtering out the SEO crap that Google happily serves up.
Google's actual search results are a waste of time visiting, both for the mindless CEO content and the ad-laden, analytics-happy, javascript-heavy websites.
So I tend to use the AI overview. But plugging myself into the all-seeing corporate oracle, that grew on all the web's content, and now seeks to supplant it seems unseemly.
It's just sad that kagi will likely only be a fringe thing, and google will continue to promote these foul, foul, mindless websites and then supplant them with its AI.
I don’t fawn, I just pay and use-and-forget. It’s almost to the point where it’s a little mental bump when I have to make a browser use it again, setting up something new.
Kagi has a pile of features I’m not getting the benefit of too, I’m sure, because it’s just-search, mostly, to me.
That’s fine; I know what I’m supporting, and I know that I’m the customer and not the product.
Because I wouldn't want Google to know what links I click on. When I used to use Google, and they added such redirects that included the destination URL as a parameter, I'd edit the link to make it just that URL before resolving it. This new scheme would make that impossible.
I use a Firefox extension to rewrite those Google redirects into plain links, to remove Google tracking of which links I click. The extension is broken now
Blocking URL shorteners and google-ad links yes! Personally for me it's also the fact that this is effectively an unresolvable URL shortener, store that link somewhere and it will most likely be dead. Can't copy link anymore and paste it on a notepad or chat app to check it out later as there isn't a guarantee it will load at all (ie: the problem with url shorteners).
