>And unlike DDG, the quality of the results is actually great.
Any chance you can expand on this?
I've used DDG for years and find the results great, but maybe we just query for different things. Is there any specific topics that you find DDG is bad at but Kagi is good at?
I'm a paying Kagi user. I don't think that I can give a clear example or explanation of why they are better, partly because it's been a long time since I used DDG, and I gave up pretty quickly. The one thing I can say is that, for the short time I was using DDG, I found myself doing a search, and then in most cases, immediately redoing the search using the !g, because the DDG results were bad, and even though I am also dissatisfied with google results these days, they were better. Kagi has the same functionality, but I find myself almost never using it.
That being said, if you personally are happy with your DDG results, then I'd say you should probably stick with it. Kagi _might_ be better for you than DDG, but if you aren't actively dissatisfied (the way I was with Google and everything else), then the room for improvement is smaller. Might be worth using their free tier (which is 100 queries per month I think) just to test out some side by side searches though.
I personally switched away from DDG when they started removing results that were errantly removed by Bing. Since Bing is their upstream results provider, I didn't feel like I was getting away from the overreach of big tech, so I went to Kagi where they don't solely rely on upstream providers as they have their own crawler and such. The fact that they offer other great features like filtering results, and integrated AI makes it worth switching and paying for. Plus, I hate ads. Targeted or not. So I'm willing to pay to make that go away for a quality service.
I tried using DDG many times in the past. I found myself using the !g constantly, because I wasn't finding what I needed in the DDG results. After a while, I started preemptively adding !g, because I assumed DDG would fail me, as it often did.
With Kagi, I haven't had that. It finds what I need and surfaces things that Google didn't. On the one or two occasions I've had trouble and jumped to Google out of desperation, I also didn't find what I was looking for there... so I guess an answer didn't exist.
For sites I don't like, I can block them from my results, or rank things higher/lower. I can make my own custom !bangs and shortcuts, instead of being stuck with what I'm given. While I haven't used Google since they launched their AI features, I can say I have really enjoyed Kagi's AI responses to questions, and that each line of the response is referenced so I can check out the source (not sure if they all do this or not... I can only compare it to ChatGPT, which does not).
It's always a better use of your time to try something and see if you like it yourself, than asking strangers. Especially when there's no inconvenience or cost of trying. How would anybody here know what your preferences are in a search engine?
I'm not a Kagi user and don't have any hard info. But I find DDG frustrating with searches. It tends to do fine enough with technical searches, like software/programming searches that I make. It's other random searches that it often fails with. DDG will fail to find the nuance in my search query, the results will flat out not be what I'm looking for, so as a sibling comment mentioned I'll fall back to using !G with some regularity.
I've stopped using Google due to their captcha being so frequent and frustrating. I don't want to spend 60+ seconds answering 6 captchas purely because I use Firefox with privacy settings/extensions.
No Tor, no VPN. Nothing too far out of the ordinary.
I usually search in a private tab, enhanced tracking protection set to strict, uBlock with most default filters enabled.
Oh and a "Google Search Fixer" extension because the make the UI much worse for Firefox. Maybe it's one of my extensions, but DDG never traps me in captcha hell.
