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Comment by datadrivenangel | Hacker News Reader

Kagi and DuckDuckGo are viable search engines! Often as good as google, sometimes better given all the SEO spam!

Years ago I gave up on DuckDuckGo because Google returned better result. Lately I gave DuckDuckGo another shot. It isn't better than before but with the deteriorating quality of the result coming from Google, now that DuckDuckGo's quality apparently isn't any worse than Google.

From my understanding, Kagi uses Google Search as a source, probably using residential IP proxies, and filter and reorder the results based on a few metrics such as the amount of ads and the domain blocks by the Kagi users.

It’s fine but I went back to DDG/Bing with uBlacklist.

What makes you think that kagi uses Google? To my understanding that is utterly incorrect.

They use Google and are completely open about it, you can easily confirm this.

It’s written on their website: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

I would also add Brave search. It returns decent results and has a very nice way of displaying reddit posts relevant to the search (saves you from having to type reddit at the end of the query :) )

I've never had a single valid result with DuckDuckGo, every single time I've used it I had to fallback to !g. And years after, I still hate the stupid name and logo.

Kagi was much more impressive than DDG when I tried it. I'll probably give it another shot in the coming month, hoping that I can completely replace Google Search this time!

DuckDuckGo no. Kagi, yes.

DDG still often returns results that closely match the exact search term, something Google seems increasingly determined not to?

Last I checked DDG is Bing. So if you think DDG is good then I guess you think Bing is good.

I personally don’t.

Can you sell me on Kagi? I took a look at the results for "best laptop" [1] and I'm underwhelmed. I see Reddit at the top (but many people here suggest adding "site:reddit.com" to the search) and most other results are from the same sites (but different order). It's hard to tell which order is better because the query is poorly written. Best laptop for what? I was also surprised to see that it recommends a site that uses affiliate links, its hard to trust those as being unbiased since there's profit motive.

Is there a better example? Re-ordering search results doesn't feel worth paying.

[1] https://kagi.com/search?q=best+laptop&r=us&sh=MuemT1_yBcwqyx...

I’m going to say that you do need to adjust to it.

It won’t give you “personalized results” like Google so you might have to adapt to that.

I have been using DDG exclusively for more than 10 years now. Because of that I cannot really compare it to other search engines, but this is also to confirm that so far I have been able to find everything I needed.

I know there are some negative reviews here about DDG. I don't know, maybe it is more about getting used to it? I remember that I definitely had to adjust quite a bit, but now I almost always get what I need in the top 5(ish) entries. I'd argue it also got better recently, as I rarely see the SEO-spam as of late.

The only thing I am still not using DDG for is searching for local shops, etc. I use Maps or Tripadvisor. Same goes for some other specific topics - it is sometimes easier to use a dedicated app. Anything else, meaning some generic search on an arbitrary topic - DDG is OK, does its job. Not more, not less.

Personally I'd say DDG is okay. It's not exactly a good search engine (early Google was definitely better), but at least it's not complete crap like 2024 Google.

Those are metasearch engines though. Take the Google/Bing output and filter it, maybe add some nice features and Voilà. It's nice but doesn't solve the underlying problem, at least if you rely on Google. A Duopoloy is somewhat better than a monopoly.

DDG seemed Ok, but I kept going back to Google. For me Kagi is worlds better than both.

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