I've been using it for a while now. It is marginally better, but not exactly night and day. It seems to struggle with intent at times, and others I just get the same bland results as the free engines. The privacy is a big plus however.
Probably because it costs money and it also likely also will quickly succumb to sloppification by experimenting with their own ai and having an unstable founder…
I'm using it for about two years and i haven't seen any sloppification. I see it as a feature that it is a paid service because i hope it will be a sustainable model for them to keep it as it is. I think it's a no brainer to pay for it instead of all the suffering people describe here. The founder remark i don't get
Right now Kagi is a better search engine than Google. Why should some eventual demise in the future discourage anyone? There is no cost of switching and you can start using it right away
Would recommend to just try their 100 free searches.
Their results are good, but it’s hard to have an objective measure. For me, it’s the little features that make it worth it (and that they have a forum for feature requests, and a proper changelog).
I've been disappointed with pretty much all recent SEs (DDG being among the very worst). Having been an early Scroogle user, ixquick (startpage) and a few other ones I dearly miss, I've been using https://freespoke.com/ lately and find it tolerable.
I was using searx instances with reasonable results but many of them started failing recently.
Anyway, I hope everyone finds a good one. I fear things will only get worse though.
