this post was submitted on 23 May 2024
511 points (97.9% liked)

Asklemmy

43159 readers
1613 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy ๐Ÿ”

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

  1. Open-ended question
  2. Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
  3. Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
  4. Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
  5. An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
 

So ddg is down, so I visit Google. It's been some years.

I just can't believe how poor it's results are, and how it's trying to suggest things it think I might also want (and failing miserably).

I just assumed ddg would be the lesser, but I use it for privacy. Turns out I'm wrong.

How long has Google been this bad?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[โ€“] [email protected] 15 points 3 months ago (2 children)

I don't know, been on Kagi for a year so forgot Google.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (3 children)

Looks nice, do you recommend it? Why not use ddg?

[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 3 months ago

I use it, and like it. They dropped prices a while back so now you can get unlimited searches for $10 a month (they also have a $5 limited tier and a free trial).

First thing is I'd like to live in a world where search engines (and the internet in general) don't have to be ad supported. This is a different model so I want to support it.

But also Kagi has some nice features. My favourite is how I can block Pinterest, and boost the ranking of other sites like Wikipedia. Basically you can have some control over search results.

If you're familiar with SearxNG, that's basically how Kagi works. They run the searches on a bunch of search engines and then present one cohesive search results page. But SearxNG for me takes several seconds to get the results, and Kagi is almost instant.

I don't know if it's significantly better than the free options, but I like using it and it's pretty cheap really.

[โ€“] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago

Not OP, but I copy my reply from the last time someone asked an opinion on kagi:

I use it, but to be honest I did not do a comprehensive comparison. I like it mostly for the fine grained website control. For work and some personal stuff I often look for code and can push websites like GitHub to appear more often. Or I can block Pinterest in my search results. I tried to do this in SearXNG, but this was too much of a hassle so in a way I pay kagi for convenience. I recently got a new job and will evaluate in the coming months if it is still worth the money, but right now I am satisfied. Nobody else I know would pay for a search engine, so I can understand the stance, but I am really fed up with all the advertising and enshitification so I thought why not give it a try. And yes, because it was recommended here.

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Kagi is just excellent so I guess that's why. It's so good I completely forgot about Google when I tried it.

I used ddg a few years back too but I always had to use Google for certain queries and never felt fully satisfied with the search results. It felt like a worse search engine that I was using because I didnt want to use Google.

With Kagi it's the opposite. It's a better search engine than Google. It's Google results without the dark patterns and hostile behavior from google.

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago (1 children)

How do you use it on mobile? I've seen there's no mobile app

[โ€“] [email protected] 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Just set Kagi as default search in your browser. There is a plugin you can install that does it, easiest way.

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/setting-default.html