Interesting - haven't heard of Kagi before but I looked them up and I can definitely see how a subscription-funded search engine leads to a better incentive structure. But can you provide qualitative examples of how your experience has been better than on Google?
- Result relevance seems on par with Google about five years ago. Very rare that I need to go past page 1.
- Advanced search operators actually work. When you quote something it actually searches for that exact string, when you minus something it actually excludes it.
- Categorization in the search results; for instance all of the low signal listicles can be segregated into their own section.
- Image search that is not intentionally nerfed that will just give you the image directly
- The ability to up and down rank specific sites from your results (something you can't feasibly do without an account anyways); good riddance Pinterest and spammy stack* reposters
- DDG-like bang searches, with the ability to add custom sites
- The obvious one: no ads or tracking or perverse incentives
Have been using Kagi since the invite phase.
The moment they opened up and switched to subscription, I immediately subscribed (you'll run out of the free quota in ~3-4h - 50 searches per month).
Paying 10$/mo for something you do hundreds of times a day, and getting consistently better results than Google, Bing or DDG, doesn't seem too much to me. I happily gave up D+ subscription to have Kagi instead.
It's very rare for me to have to scroll past for the first 5 results with Kagi. With the other search engines, nowadays I can't find anything relevant in the first page.
