I recently stopped using Kagi after using them for a long time. For whatever reason, their results became pretty bad compared to before, often almost mirroring Google.
If I search for `foo bar baz`, I want pages with `foo`, `bar` and `baz`, please. No, verbatim doesn't cut it because it somehow is far too strict and even common queries return half a dozen results at most. Google started sucking in the 2010s when they decided they know better than me, and the more Kagi improves, the more they follow down Google's path of trying to be outsmart me, and falling short.
I just want a 2003 Google experience. A computer is not smarter than me, stop trying to interpret and make assumptions.
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Aside, is it so hard to make a search engine with a query interface like any trigram-based SQL full-text engine? With quotes, AND, OR and -word. I still believe any AI-powered solution of the past 20 years to be a mockery of this gold standard of precision and simplicity, except maybe Google 1.0.
Google in 2003 was good because the web wasn't quite so full of utter garbage. There must be 100x more content at least now.
But Kagi often being as good as Google used to be proves this isn't the only reason.
Lately I have felt Kagi also sometimes stray down this "knows better than me what I want" path.
I recommend using the forums to let them know. They actually read the forums and act on it.
I've reported both ux improvements and search quality issues and more and they have always taken it seriously.
I noticed something similar with Ecosia, they apparently switched to using both Bing and Google, and the results, while still pretty good seems a little worse. That's all anecdotal and may be completely random, but I think one issue could be that Google is getting worse.
To maintain your level of privacy requires a drastically different lifestyle than most of us have or want.
That is for me one of the downsides of Kagi.
Also, you probably are aware of this, but an incognito window won't magically stop trackers.
They didn't state anything about their desired level of privacy other than not wanting a username attached to every search. That's not equivalent to needing to use TOR for every search.
>99% of people are probably signed into a google account when they search google
What is the relevance of this statement? Obviously this wouldn't apply to the parent poster, it doesn't refute anything the parent said, and at least anecdotally it's not true at all.
>If you want the sort of privacy you seem to want, stick to the dark web and similarly inconvenient tools.
Privacy is a spectrum, not some binary choice between having a username (and often real name) attached to every search vs. using the dark web for every search. You can land somewhere in the middle, for example: "I don't want a username attached to every search".
There is no technical reason Kagi needs usernames, but they choose to require them. For some people, that points to the company not being as privacy-friendly as other people seem to think/claim.
I'll mull the decision for a while but I'm probably going to give Kagi another try.
Since Kagi became Google for my purposes, I started using Google again. I don’t have much motivation to curate the customization features personally.
I would imagine that it could depend on the general type of query. As a developer I definitely noticed a decline in quality.
I’m quite privacy focused but for whatever reason don’t care if Google knows that I want to know how to write a helm chart or eat pasta later
There's more blatantly obvious spam results seeping into Kagi as well, though at least I can block those domains when I come across them. A few of them were hacked websites, notably government websites in South Asia that had been thoroughly compromised.
(Just found what you meant by Verbatim search - nope, I would have always had Personalized turned on instead. Seeing those results would be the first time I even encountered those domains, so I didn't know to block the domain until then. Since the domain is still in my blocklist, I can confirm it was a government website in Mumbai. I don't have any reason to be visiting Indian government sites.)
I'm not saying every Kagi search is infected with hacked results, it's only common at times when I'm really researching something and need to get to a second page of results.
I also note that some Warez sites rank highly in Kagi too. Knowing that Kagi's customer base is largely from HN, that's less surprising to me, and I'm thankful that I can block those domains from my own personal results.