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Comment by ctvo | Hacker News Reader

Pay for Kagi. It's worth it.

Gave it a try some time ago and it was at Bing's level in terms of the search quality. Even simple queries for something as trivial like (Windows) API function names came back with a lot of noise and junk as a top result. Less trivial stuff was worse. I love the idea behind it, but it's not a real alternative for Google, not yet.

Been using Kagi now for a couple months and overall find it better than G. G also returned lots of rubbish depending on the query. At least in Kagi I can blacklist obvious SEO spam sites and never see them again.

That's the beauty of Kagi, you can hide and downrank the noise and junk websites so that you only get the high-quality domains you're looking for.

Did you use the custom ranking feature? Pin the official docs, raise good sources, lower or block bad ones.

Well, no. I expected the search engine to give relevant results right off the bat.

I had switched from Google to DDG years. DDG seemed to be marginally better at the time, but I really switched because DDG was not Google. Google had become annoying.

About six months ago I tried Kagi, then I signed up with them. Kagi delivers what I want: Fast, accurate search results that I can tweak. I'm a huge fan at this point.

The only time I don't use Kagi is if I'm running incognito over VPN, so I use another search engine (DDG or Bing) that I don't have to sign in to.

Not sure if you are aware - you can use Kagi in incognito too. Kagi can generate a link with a token that won't require you to sign in. Their official desktop and mobile extensions handle this case once you generate the access token. I only use private mode in iOS Safari and Kagi works as expected.

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