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.

Yup, same here. Been using Kagi for years. It's boring, it just works. Hoping they can stay that way.

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’m not fawning over it but it’s

- usually better than Google

- has actually useful features (smush BS listicle articles together, weight/block sites)

- if you don’t use any searches that month, they’ll just straight up refund the month subscription automatically

- doesn’t annoy me constantly

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.