Kagi Search: a decent Google alternative

A few months ago I've found the Kagi Search Engine. It is a commercial product, that costs around $25 per month at the time of this article.

The reason why I initially became interested is mainly because I would like there to be an alternative to the ad-supported model of web search. If you think about it -- regular users are not Google's customers. It's actually the advertisers. This means that Google is not interested in making search results better for you, or to help you find high-quality answers.

When you search for product reviews, or programming-related advice, you'd often land at content farms that have very low-signal content, often biased towards their own advertisers.

What initially tipped the scale for me is that Kagi, in contrast to Google, allows you to down-rank certain domains or classes of websites, so that your results are better tailored to you. In addition, they try to tune the base search algorithm to prioritize higher quality content. So I decided to give it a try, and subscribed for a few months.

To be honest, I didn't have high expectations. I used alternative search engines before, and they all were pretty underwhelming. DuckDuckGo didn't last a week being my default search engine, mainly due to poor relevance of the results.

Surprisingly, this was not the case for Kagi. I've just looked at the billing history, and seems like I've been using it for the last 9 months. The number of searches where I fall back to Google is almost zero.

If you're interested in a user-friendly search engine -- give it a try.