Back to Kagi

Around three months ago, I published my thoughts on Kagi and why I decided not to pay for the service. About two months ago, I got frustrated with the free search engine of my choice—DuckDuckGo—and subscribed to the starter plan with Kagi.

The experience with DuckDuckGo was frustrating. Here is my observation from a few weeks back then on DDG.

DuckDuckGo is dying a death by a thousand cuts. The search results are becoming increasingly dismal, and ads are creeping more into the list that matters. It's becoming painful to use by the day. I didn't think I would ever miss Kagi's results-only experience.

I tried many other search engines. I don't like Google's current direction—it's no longer a helpful search engine. I also tried Bing Search, which has hardly any differentiator. Perplexity.ai remained my default for a while, but AI first was not what I wanted. It attempted to provide answers and often failed at that. I don't generally ask questions to search engines, which most services believe is what I do.

To me, a search engine is an index that I use to reach my destination online quickly. I am not looking for direct answers. I will build my own answer, my own opinion. Kagi brilliantly supports this model of search. Plus, if I am looking for quick answers in that rare moment, I can do that intentionally.

Does it mean I am done with Kagi? Well, who knows? But here's the thing—only a better search quality will make me switch.

I had ended my last post with this question. It didn't take Kagi too long to win me over as a customer. All it took was a clean list of destinations on the web to which it could lead me. It's funny how a list of search results is now a search engine's differentiator.