Kagi

It’s now been roughly 6 months I’ve switched from DuckDuckGo to Kagi. I started paying right away after roughly the one month trial.

I had not been very happy with DDG; mostly the results were very low quality (having to switch back to Google one too many times; results often lagged behind by months of publishing), many search bugs, and there’s been that thing with Bing advertising, and generally not seeing many improvements over the ~2 years I tried to use it full-time.

Kagi, on the other hand, has his search engine worked out. I know they also pull data from Bing, but also various other sources (apparently that includes Google) and their own scraper (Teclis, TinyGem), etc.

You can compare the Google and Kagi results. While not entirely the same, I don’t think Google‘s are better than Kagi‘s.

So search is really good and I very very rarely ever need to head back to Google. Only for very obscure errors with very few results, and Google almost never has a better answer.

It also adds some cool other features, like rewriting URLs.

For example, I run my own Libreddit, so when search results include reddit, I can now redirect to my own Reddit instance (sorry, you won’t have access).

There’s a bunch of other cool stuff, like Bangs (short codes that would redirect directly to a site, for example w for wiki — so w flightradar would show this result instantly; and there’s more like hackernews, reddit, google, etc).

You can also lower priority of certain sites. Seeing too much Tiktok or Pinterest? Want to boost Hackernew results? All possible!

To make it work on iOS, you need to install a browser extension, but that works relatively well (it rewrites your search from Google to Kagi).

I was a bit apprehensive as it’s a very small team, and they are also trying to reinvent the browser space with Orion, which is a cut-throat tough market to get in. Two massive enterprises that would need a lot of funding and a lot of dev time.

Orion is based on Safari, and far from good enough to replace Firefox, but I’m actually mildly enthusiastic about this project as well.

The company is very transparent and there’s clear progress. If you want to get involved, they also have a Discord and a feedback/bug forum.

I’m considering a family plan and will force Shan to switch once released.

So, all things considered, quite excited about this. Looking forward to see if they can revolutionise search. And I truly hope they make it.

The only thing I don’t like is that their logo looks too much like Google’s… 🙈