[jp10558]

I think it depends a lot on the user. I never found DuckDuckGo to have good results, I think because it's based on Bing, and that remains laughable to this day (I have recently had to use it a bit and holy hell it's shit). I am comparing to startpage, which is I guess a more anonymous Google.

Kagi is at least as good for my day to day use, though I can't say it's obviously better. What it does have that I find useful is more ability to rank forum posts and the like higher, where they often have the real answers. Along with the "lenses" which let you kind of say what sort of stuff you're looking for - like only forum posts.

Right now, they also added to the Ultimate level a bunch of AI models you can chat with, which actually have pretty up to date knowledge it seems, and wider knowledge. For example, Claude 2 via Kagi was able to both help me as a DM with making a D&D 3.5e NPC (GPT4 can't do that alone, or at least didn't for me, and the plugin I tried to use that was suggested just didn't work at all), all the way to actually quickly finding JunOS commands and giving useful info about various outputs and clarifying what to do - which so far seem to be correct.

But the actual value to me is I can also ask GPT4 from Kagi, and Google Bison, so I don't need multiple subscriptions. I don't actually know how long this will hold true, but for now Kagi does a lot of stuff in one place that's pretty useful for me.

[jchw]

I typically use search engines not to answer questions but to search for things, like for example, maybe I want to find an old Qt Quarterly because something on HN made me think about it, or I'm looking for really deep MSDN documents about Text Services Framework to research something about how IME works on Windows. My biggest issue with Kagi is that whatever indices it seems to pull from seem less deep than both Bing and Google. Now, I could be wrong and maybe it's actually bigger or it uses one of them for some of its results, but my experience was that I was able to get results on DDG when Kagi couldn't return any for a given query.

Generally, I find that Google is a bigger index with a better ranking algorithm on top of it. However, DDG/Bing do generally seem to have an impressive index, and one of the biggest differentiators for most search engines that are not Google is that most search engines that are not Google will generally allow you to search for what you want to search for. I feel like with Google, it's very difficult to force it to always include all of the exact terms I'm specifying; it wants to search for something else. Sometimes I'm not even sure it's able to differentiate between two similar looking terms!

With all of this said, Kagi definitely was nice in terms of the fact that it felt like it was doing a good job of searching for what I asked for and an alright job ranking them. I gave it my best shot. But, alas, I never got to the point where I felt comfortable not searching Google afterwards. Even as much as Google pisses me off, it feels like their index is just far and away the largest, and it's not even really close.