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Comment by s_dev | Hacker News Reader

I use DDG but actively of thinking switching to Kagi: https://kagi.com/ -- it's a paid service but I can justify it based on the amount of search queries I run everyday. Has anyone switched and not looked back?

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I've been using it exclusively since beta and am completely satisfied! The key improvement for me over other services is the ability to boost and block domains—it comes with a decent set of filters for the worst offenders (I've never seen a GitHub issues or StackOverflow mirror), but it's two clicks to block a domain that I personally don't like seeing. Pinterest, geeksforgeeks, and a bunch of other low-quality high-SEO sites all get permanently blocked for me, which is a huge quality of life improvement.

Blocking Quora alone makes it worth the price of entry.

Oh, totally. It's a sign of just how much better my search life has been that I'd completely forgotten about Quora when I was trying to remember what I'd blocked.

And blocking any Medium website.

I’ve been paying for kagi as well and am really satisfied with the results. One improvement tho: the image search is not there yet. I often have to use Google (or better: Yandex) for that.

Kagi user. I think it's pretty dang good. After comparing its results to google for the first few days, Kagi really does appear to be as good by default, and you can make it better by up/downranking various domains. Its quick answer feature is also fantastic (if perhaps not as quick as its name would suggest).

I switched from DDG to Kagi about a month ago, and I've been very, very happy with the switch. I should have done it sooner.

Me. The best $10 I spend every month. Amazing what happens when you are the customer, not the product.

Like siblings, I switched and never looked back. I used !g with DDG often, more as the years went on tbh, but with Kagi the only time I use !g is when the search results end in one page, which is rare and almost always the Google results are noisy trash. Maybe 5% of searches I check Google and 10% of those actually return something useful that Kagi didn't. On balance with how much better the other 95% of queries are, first time I'm excited to search for things.

My biggest complaint with Kagi is sometimes when I search for something the top result is a pinned domain that maybe hit the right keywords but mentally to me it was unrelated to the search I was performing. That's a pretty good problem to have at the end of the day.

> with Kagi the only time I use !g is when the search results end in one page, which is rare and almost always the Google results are noisy trash

That might be because Google won't admit when it doesn't have results responsive to your query. It will just fill the results page with nonsense instead of saying "I couldn't find any results".

Definitely, and I'm ok with not getting results, Kagi is doing the right thing.

Kagi is awesome. Started paying for it before my trial even expired and there’s zero chance I’m going back to Google or DDG.

Yes. It's the first time I've successfully replaced Google search.

Previously, I used DDG but pretty much reflexively g!'d every query.

Kagi is fantastic. I rarely use anything else now. Mostly if I’m on a browser I have yet to configure.

I’m surprised I normally stay within the $5 plans limits, but when I’m regularly above I’ll gladly bump to the next tier.

I'm on the same boat. Used to g! most of my queries with ddg. Since switching to kagi, I've fallen back to Google for only a few queries, and I think only one or two had better results

I use a number of different search engines for different purposes. Yandex offers sites duckduckgo doesn't. Duckduckgo offers sites Google doesn't Google is good overall and at image searching.

You seem like someone who has used a number of search engines. How does it treat sites Google blacklists like nsfw sites or porn sites or torrent sites? Does typing in movie/book/game torrent bring up listings the way Google previously did? How does it treat older non-mobile friendly sites? Is the image search comparable to Google?

Once they brought back the unlimited searching, I jumped on board and couldn't be happier. I only had to use "!g" to get live baseball scores. The quality is fantastic and I cannot recommend them enough

I've been using Kagi since the beta, and used DDG for years before that. I would not switch to Kagi for search result quality. It is fine, but has never blown me away. I would switch to it for privacy, for not being the product, and for certain UX features they support but Google never would (like being able to map reddit.com -> old.reddit.com, or being able to block or downrank content from search spam sites like Pinterest)

Yes. Started using Kagi while they were in beta. When they launched the paid service I gave them my money right away. 10/10 strong recommend.

I’ve been thinking of switching to Kagi too so this is good to hear. My biggest concern is that they’ll eventually sell out and flip on their current privacy policy as we’ve so many other tech businesses do.

Anything's possible, but they're good right now. If they stop being good in the future, then it's not hard to bail and switch to something better.

They will lose pretty much all their current users when that happens.

I switched to Kagi a month ago, and it's fine but the experience of using it doesn't live up to the hype IMO. You don't really "feel" the privacy benefit, so it's just a paid search engine that mostly lines up with Google's quality.

Kagi uses CrystalLang. Wow. Didn't know it was used anywhere in production

Where'd you see that?

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/company/hiring-kagi.html

The first days, I compared to google the results. But since I customised the result to boost/lower site I want, I never looked back.

kagi is amazing for non-technical searches. i'm going to go back to it once they figure out location-aware searches and improve results for non-technical searches.

I do not regret switching to Kagi.

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