Kagi is crazy good
Here I was in my own little bubble appearently, thinking people were using https://kagi.com to search now that it exists, but a comment I got made me realize that's probably not the case...
You really should try this search engine. I switched to it 6 months ago and before that I was using duckduckgo, and often had to throw a !g in there to get proper results.
I remember setting it as default as a test and then I just forgot about Google. :)
It's not free however, you will have to pay a few bucks for it. But to me it's about supporting alternatives to Google which I very happily do. It's only a few bucks.
Have you tried it and what was your experience?
I switched to Kagi a few months ago, and I haven't had to use !g at all so far. Given that I had to daily on DDG, I'm pretty satisfied with the results!
Exactly my experience. It was just a switch and forget thing. Very nice.
Maybe it's just a few people that care, but I really care about not having Google record what I'm doing on the web. Why should any company be allowed to look at that? They don't own the internet, it's not theirs, even though I guess it feels like that sometimes since they are everywhere.
I have been experimenting with this week and while I like it, I am still not sure I like it enough to find it worth paying. It is still mostly using Google and Bing as a search provider, so I haven't so far found drastically different results than what I get from DuckDuckGo. Having a limit on searches also makes me a bit anxious when you are used to just searching for all kinds of stuff simply because I am lazy and don't want to type in full URLs or go to my bookmarks. Lots of muscle memory that needs to be revamped. I do see the potential in how it can be customized with personalized lenses and lowering/raising specific domains. And the people behind it seem really nice on Discord, so I expect to see a lot of innovation in search that we haven't seen from Google in years.
Technically it is not very different - it gives the same search results with some extra pluses. But by using it, Google don't get to save those private searches under your personal private name in their databases. Why are we ok with them doing that? I'm really not.
What does !g do in ddg?
Uses Google to search from ddg.
You have to pay a few bucks? How many and how often?
Going over is 1.5¢ per search.
I've been using kagi for a while now and has basically replaced Google for me. One of the things I really like is the ability to have rewrite rules for URLs which I use for stuff like Aws cli docs which almost always link to an old version by default but now I always get to the right page first time
That sounds interesting, I’ll have to check that out.
If you’re looking for another search engine, I will always offer Ecosia as another. It essentially uses a Bing engine but uses the ad revenue to plant actual living trees around the world. They document their progress and release their financial statements.
I’ll use Ecosia for things that are not really private and then Brave for everything else.
I use ecosia as my default search engine within the brave browser. I make sure I still see ecosia's ads, and click on them when they're relevant to what I'm searching for.