I was skeptical at first though let me tell you, Kagi is so much better. I get exact search terms, which is immensely useful as a programmer, rather than providing results for what Google thinks I want to search for. It's also really, really nice not seeing ads as search results anymore, ad blocker or no ad blocker.
Is it as comprehensive as Google search? It meets about 95-96% of my needs. I still use Google very infrequently for some really obscure domain specific searches if Kagi doesn't find anything useful, though that's getting rarer and rarer.
It's also easy to block AI generated sites that pop up providing just enough likeness, but really are regurgitated AI trash, or are 'Wikipedia clones'.
I have no financial interest in Kagi, other than paying to use it. It has certainly been worth it for me.
- Did you try Marginalia?
  it meets your criteria+ it's opensource.
  
  Is it broken? It returns nothing.
  
  ???
  
  It seems like the query was the problem. “Bitscan forward NASM” didn’t return anything but “NASM bsf” did return 2 results although they weren’t very useful.
  
  So this whole post is an advertisement, then.
  
  Personal recommendations are not really advertisements.
- I really liked Kagi at first, especially since I use it mainly for programming as well, but recently I feel like the quality has gone downhill. Right around the time they integrated the Brave stuff I've noticed a significant amount of me having to scroll down past the usual Google-like fluff results before getting to actually relevant information. It's a little sad to see because when I first used it, it was so good now it basically feels like a skinned Google-lite at this point. I'm still a customer but only because I haven't found a good alternative yet.

53 comments