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this post was submitted on 24 Sep 2023
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A good search engine would be nice to have (again). How come even duck duck go or other (free?) search engines are also so bad now?
Because operating a search engine is expensive. I personally use Kagi and love it, but that's $10/month for unlimited searches.
I tried the 100 free searches from Kagi and compared the results to DDG. In almost every search the results were the same. Even the order. I think the real benefit to Kagi is the lack of ads and tracking, tha's all.
I think the real reason search sucks these days is the AI they put between you and what your looking for. It's no longer searching for what you typed, it's searching for what it thinks you want.
The huge benefit of Kagi is that they allow you to customize results and blacklist SEO spam or deprioritize sites you don't care about in your results. Out of the box, I've had a similar experience with the results being very similar to DDG, though. Over time, I suspect it'd be a better overall experience, but that's hard to judge in 100 searches.
I've been on the fence whether that's worth the cost to me, but I've been increasingly leaning toward biting the bullet.
I’ve been giving it a go, too. It does seem to be a bit better overall, with customized site priorities being the coolest part.
I think I could get on board for 5 bucks, but a tenskee a month is something I’ll look at twice whenever I take a critical look at the subscriptions.
They have $5 for 300 searches per month
True. I get weird with caps, but maybe 300 would be reasonable. I’ll definitely consider that when the trial runs dry!
I thought i would use more, but i am averaging 2.5 per day which will be just fine. When/if you run out for the month you can always pass "!ddg" into it because its free and doesnt count against you.
That’s a good option on using the bang search.
Ultimately, I just don’t want the overhead of thinking which search engine to use based on quotas. Bang searches would be a little annoying, but less annoying than going to a different site altogether.
Yeah, that is understandable. 300/31 = ~9.677 searches per day so as long as you don't search that much you are good. I thought i was using way more searches until i actually started tracking it. The quota concerned me too, but i now see i need not have worried.
I'm test driving it right now too. The subscription cost is easier to spend when you envision taking that $10 away from Google and giving it to kagi.
But google doesn't cost 10 dollars a month to search.........
You're saying search infrastructure and hardware is free like air?
It's not what it costs them, it's what they make off you. Your search traffic is their revenue stream. Remember- If a service is free, you are the product
Fair enough, though they still serve ads, and even if you block them they still get referral fees (that bezos tried to dodge with smile)
I'd actually gotten in the habit of only using Google search incognito, I had to enable kagi in private tabs.
Thanks for your comment. Those are some useful features that I would not have known about otherwise. I'll give it another try.
And since it doesn't think, the results are predictably awful