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Comment by Grombobulous | Hacker News Reader

I started my journey on DuckDuckGo and got tired of the “30% of the time” bit that you mention, where a large section of your searches end up going back to Google anyway.

I find that Kagi is pretty much 99% “never need to use Google.” The results are just really good.

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I've been a Kagi user for two years, and I've also onboarded my 70-year-old mother. She's happy to have a web search that works and an excellent translation service, which, by the way, uses AI where and how it actually makes sense.

Kagi uses mainly Google for its search results, so that's a given.

Not really. Kagi has its own indexes and says a typical query consults about a dozen sources. [1]

[1] https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm...

It does, but not exclusively, and it puts its special disenshittification secret sauce (which isn't that good but much better than nothing) on top.

Kagi actually tells you what percentage of the results came from their own index versus external ones near the top when you do a search. E.g., when I search for “iPhone Duo” it says “52% unique Kagi results.”

I also think that there’s a strange X factor that’s hard to describe with search engine quality. I don’t think the index that gets used is everything that goes into it.

I imagine that as soon as you combine or reconcile more than one index source or reorder the results, you’ve produced a unique search engine.

E.g., a search engine could basically only use Bing as the source but if it changed the order or omitted results it would possibly be improving those results despite not having its own index.

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