I mostly use it when I do second language searches and it is like using search in that country.
Quite frustrating honestly.
(Another related thing that’s frustrating is people using my IP to determine language instead of the Accept-Language header my browser sends)
1. When I look for English words on Google, it prioritizes german dictionaries, sometimes for many pages instead of a) English dictionaries OR b) actual English pages relevant for that word
2. When I search for programming stuff, it prioritizes german pages, such as blog entries to the english documentation/english blog entries, which I find in any case more complete and diverse. Some peope prefer reading everything in German, but that is just not my cup of tea
No priority for news sources that are in a direct business relationship, every filter and setting can be modified without creating an account, heavily penalize advertising, no hiding of URLs, not filtering content for political reasons.
I've recently started trying out the Kagi beta and it is the first time I'm not `!g`-ing constantly. It seems to give me what I want with the queries I expect. At first I was a bit worried that it might not find my perfect balance of news-vs-older-content, but I was pleasantly surprised. Searches seem to result in a nice ranking of current events vs other information. It also brings back the "Discussion" search feature that Google used to have in a good way.
If the result quality continues to live up to my expectations I can see myself paying for the service down the line, but will see how it goes over time; as well as how the privacy stance of the devs progresses in regards to both privacy and data ownership of subscribing users _and_ of the subjects of queries (in relation to RTBF requests and such).
I already switched to DuckDuckGo, and I'm happy with it.
$10 per month minimum after beta.
I wish them luck but DDG for the win at that rate in my opinion.
Search is a good and much needed example of how simple, context based advertising can be applied in an effective and user friendly, privacy respecting manner.
These are my predictions:
1: Never has enough userbase to become sustainable. Very likely given that a search engine costing as much as a hulu account is not a value proposition and Kagi folds after a few years.
2: Kagi gets bought out by a larger brand and takes on the hulu platform of pay + ads.
3: Kagi gets enough of a userbase to get recognition, so advertisers and companies start targeting and optimizing their sites for that service so that they can get a share of a crowd that will pay to search the internet, eventually turning them into what Google is now.
4: Companies invest into Kagi, buying a premium subscription to enable the search functionality on their own systems. Soon after the companies realize they are covering a significant portion of their income streams and start blackmailing Kagi to change their business model so that their userbase is preferentially directed towards the controlling companies' products.
5: Kagi gets investors who do what the companies in 4 would do.
6: Cheaper competitors arrive and the paid search engine concept goes into a death spiral race to the bottom, destroying the field for everyone. (I can get the same results as Kagi on "Gluffer" for $0.99/month and the first 6 months are free! etc., etc.)
There's very little chance that they make it past all of these hurdles. It would require a creator/owner with amazing self-discipline and an absolute corporate credo to force them to turn away money (all the way up to bankruptcy and the end of the business) in favor of the people that use their products.
By that time I already moved to click on a link somewhere in the results, and the page shift makes me click on the wrong link.
