I think it's hard to describe how one search engine is less good than another. It just... is. Quite often there are very few or even no relevant results for my query, and as soon as I put a "!g" in front of it I quickly find what I'm looking for.

Don't get me wrong, DDG works fine for me for 90% of my search queries (which are usually quite straightforward). But I have noticed a difference in quality vs Google, at the margins. I'm considering trying out Kagi.

I love DDG but there’s still an awful lot of weird results. Just the other day I searched for a clothing brand and the first result wasn’t their homepage but someones saved wish list (something like “?wishlistid=someuid”). It was bizarre. I don’t know enough about SEO to know if it’s down to the owners of the site or some weird DDG indexing but I’ve found a lot of weird indexing like this where you’d expect the homepage and get a very specific page instead.

Google still beats DDG on local search and providing latest results on news updates and other changing events. On more technical and stable topics, DDG is miles better and doesn't drown in clickbait or ads like Google does. These tend to be 99% of the searches i do throughout a day, so using DDG first is a no-brainer. The best way to describe it is it works exactly like google did 5-10 years ago, without neither the improvements nor the regressions that has happened since.

For truly rare and unique searches, Google undeniable has a bigger index, so cases where searching for a unusual error code 0x004104010 give you nothing on DDG, Google could find one poor soul in an obscure Korean forum, that solved the same issue and then translate the result, just enough for you to recover your broken data.

I last tried DDG a couple of years ago, so it may have improved. But I gave it a good hard try for several months, and I just kept finding instances where I couldn't find something that I knew should be out there. Then I switched back to Google and it was like a breath of fresh air, I was finding things easily again.

But I'd say with Kagi it's almost the opposite - it finds things at least as well and there aren't ads to get in the way. It feels like old-school Google.

I actually found that I was getting annoyed on my mobile devices because they were still searching on Google and I need to scroll past ads etc., before I recently switched them over.

I often search for an error message from software, get nothing useful from DDG, then add the "!g" and find exactly my problem.

Non-English queries have usually poor result.

Kagi founder here. I am of the opinion that things are not and do not have to be perfect. We do not want to market Kagi as a perfect product, without flaws. What you see is what you get. We have a lot of work to do. Google, a trillion dollar company with nearly 200K most talented employees, still gets many things wrong in their results. We are a ten people bootstrapped team, and the web is a vast problem, just to align expectations.

I am personally not bothered by small errors here and there, it is important to get the big picture right - alignment of incentives inside the search experience. Overall, I believe we also have superior results to Google, please try it for a few days and share your thoughts.

Kagi is in some ways broken and flawed and it is what makes it feel more humane to use.

If there are things that particulary bother you feel free to share them on kagifeedback.org. We are not ignorant of these, just limited by our current resources.

It doesn't seem like it works all that well either...

Their example is the headphone search. That Reddit post is a few months old, and has _one_ comment on it. The thread asks specifically about closed-back headphones under $150.

Something like this would be much better as a result: https://www.reddit.com/r/headphones/comments/nq0pt/headphone...

> the reddit result card shows '2 days ago', whereas the link it points to is 7 months old.

This happens on Google too, all of the time. I think this is a reddit issue, with how they have their meta configured...

Also a subscriber to Kagi.

In my experience it's at least marginally better, but one of the really nice features that Kagi has (and probably the main reason I subscribe) is you can extremely easily block domains. So whenever I hit a SEO garbage site, I just go back, block it, and I never worry about it again. In the areas you regularly search, this quickly gets you to a result page that is substantially higher quality than google.

Sorry, I'm far from an expert here. They started recently and just went out of closed beta I believe. I've been using it for a few months now.

They have a lot of nice features pulled from Google and DDG:

https://help.kagi.com/kagi/getting-started/index.html

I haven't done any objective tests, so can't really say much about search quality except that it definitely works at least as well as Google for my searches (usually tech or legal stuff), and it doesn't have ads. Whatever I'm looking for is usually the top result if my query is good and it's not something that's ambiguous.

I keep going back and forth between you and brave. I love the concept of brave's goggles but I wish it was more like point/click and it could automagically pick the best goggle based on keywords etc.