I‘ve been using Kagi since September as well and I can only recommend giving it a try.
Being able to personalize search rankings is something I definitely wouldn‘t want to miss anymore.
One thing I’d like to mention is that they‘re also really great at listening to feedback. For example, they recently added an indicator for potentially paywalled sites to the search results, because users have suggested it.
I like Kagi and have been using since September. Just wish they could prove they aren’t logging anything.
Are there independent groups that audit that kind of thing?
Tried kagi due to all the yapping here on lemmy, 99% of the results are exactly the same as ddg, no matter what their “x% unique kagi results” says, which just strikes me as dishonest. If they’re going to lie to me about things I can check, why would I trust them when they say they don’t log or track?
There’s definitely some kind of astroturf marketing campaign going on here, this guy’s only interaction with the fediverse is posting a link to some softball piece review of an incredibly underwhelming service.
I can tell you that I’ve been using Kagi for a few months and it hasn’t been life changing or anything. But I would say that it has been useful enough to keep around. I honestly like the info dense layout over the other search sites, and I use the ability to push down or block sites entirely so I don’t see the spam sites I don’t want to see. Also, “quick answers” is actually pretty useful sometimes when I don’t want to click on any of the search results. Plus, with the $10 sub, you get unlimited uses of the summarizer, which has been great for arxiv papers.
I wouldn’t say it’s for everyone and I don’t know if there’s astroturfing going on, but it’s been useful enough for me to keep paying the $10 a month
For reliable results today it is essential to use several search engines. The one who crawls the web the longest is Google, it is therefore advisable to use search engines that use this engine, such as Whoogle or Startpage.
Even so, it is also necessary to use search engines with alternative engines, such as DDG (Bing), or search engines with several engines, such as Mojeek or MetaGer, which use their own crawlers, such as Groot or AstianGo.
Search engines that use AI are also now proliferating, but, although practical, so far none are truly privacy oriented, with one exception, the one that was the first to use this technique with AI, Andisearch, which uses its own language model, not logs, no ads, no tracking, anonymous.
You search, although more private than others, requires activating privacy in the settings, also questionable due to its other AI functionalities that it incorporates, apart from the registration requirement to use them.
or search engines with several engines, such as Mojeek or MetaGer
Just a flag, we don’t use several engines, all Mojeek is Mojeek, you might be conflating this with Search Choices. AstianGO seems to be inaccessible now, but it wasn’t an own-index search engine,
