Every time I see these posts about Kagi I wonder why you would not just use DuckDuckGo. Its free, the results are about the same and it has better filters for blocking AI spam.
When I used DDG, the results were worse than Google, and I kept going back to Google when I couldn't find something, always second-guessing the results. And it seems every time someone recommends DDG the first thing they point out is "you can just type !g to get google results!", so I assume this is still the case.
With Kagi, the results are better than Google, and the first couple times I couldn't find something with Kagi and went back to Google, the Google results were even worse.
I used DDG until I subbed to Kagi. The price of Kagi is worth either one of the ad-free experience and the better search results I get. (i.e. if Kagi didn't exist I'd be willing to pay for an ad-free DDG.)
My decision to move away from DDG was when they blocked a website due to Bing blocking it. The block was inadvertent. But it showed the flaw in relying on an external provider for all your results. You're just using Bing with a different UI. Kagi having their own index (plus being enhanced by several others), was a huge selling point for me initially. Truly separated from a reliance on big-tech and their whims.
Kagi results are entirely sourced from other indexes (mainly google and yandex), their own index (Teclis) is small and insufficient. I guess you fell for the marketing. DDG also claims to have its own index btw, but as you've noticed it's the same situation. It's basically useless and 99% of the results are straight from Bing.
The only smaller search engine with its own real index is Brave.
Sure, their index plays a small part of the equation, but they aren't reliant on any 1 index for their resultset. But sure, I guess their marketing worked.
The index was why I looked elsewhere.
The reason I switched to Kagi was because of their business model where I'm a customer not a product. So results are theoretically tailored for value to me not value to the company.
