In my experience it's not that there's better quality results found, but rather low quality results are skipped. There's a lot filtered by default + it's easy to click "block this domain" when you run into yet another stackoverflow copy. It means that when you're searching for code related things, you often get small relevant blogs in position 3+ rather than SEO spam.

For example searching for "current time on JavaScript" on Google, I get SO, MDN, and basically a lot of SEO spam sites. Same thing on Kagi https://kagi.com/search?q=current+time+in+JavaScript&r=au&sh... ends with an actually interesting blog on position 5, link to moment.js on GH, further down posts about accuracy and about the Temporal API proposal, etc.

Yes.

In four ways for me:

- it actually respects my search. If I search for "<some word or phrase that doesn't exist>" I get no result. It doesn't silently twist my search until it gets something it can show me a million utterly irrelevant results for. This is a huge time saver for me.

- there are no ads. I usually didn't notice ads in the search results anyway as they were always irrelevant, but recently there has been so many of them that it took away space from the search results. Going back now feels weird.

- as others have already mentioned a lot of low quality pages just doesn't show up, leaving room for other, more relevant and/or high quality pages.

- built in tooling to deal with pages I don't care about and that Kagi hasn't already dealt with.

If you evaluate Kagi make sure to play around with the "Personalized Results" settings. I find as a programmer, I love the ability to push blogs and resources I like up to the top of the list. You can check out the leaderboard to see, globally what sites get blocked or raised: https://kagi.com/stats?stat=leaderboard

I'm just a week into using it, but one of the things I've noticed is that for technical queries official docs are ranked a lot higher than random blogs and those sites that just repackage content they scraped from Stack Overflow.

I don't know if they're putting a finger on the scale, or maybe they're just doing the original Google thing of ranking sites that seem to be where the search terminates higher, but it's good.

> Can the search result quality be quantified somehow?

Encourage you to try it. I've repeated Scott Galloway's mantra that advertisement is a tax on America's poor and stupid. But I never quite clocked the cost of search ads. It might be solely due to that lack of scrolling through crud that makes Kagi seem much, much faster than Google or DuckDuckGo.

It’s not that Kagi is better at search, it’s that Kagi is cleaner and more efficient. It doesn’t do bullshit dark patterns, reward SEO, track the shit out of you, or hide valuable tools.

I’m a huge fan of the lenses feature. Specifically for technical searches… I can filter for forums only or PDFs only or academic stuff only.

I think I belong to the generation that grew up using just Google so I cannot comment on quantification.

The biggest difference for me is that on Kagi, the first results are always relevant instead of clutter/ads that you see on Google.

I read some days back on HN that even Yandex is better than Google nowadays. And I apologoze for shilling a Russian company, but it is true! For some queries, Yandex is better than Google.

I have replaced Google completely with DDG for most searches, ChatGPT for some things, GitHub Copilot for mundane code questions, phind or code.you.com for things requiring more search, and Kagi for things requiring much more searching.

I use Google only now for nearby searches like "gas stations near me", etc.

I never really thought that this day would come. I love Kagi for being able to block Pinterest from everywhere, GeeksforGeeks, etc.

When I first signed up for Kagi, I found myself just searching for fun. I hadn’t had that feeling in forever (well apart from when Google was first launched)

Very happy customer here.

When I was still on the early beta with limited searches, kagi felt like a secret weapon I pulled out when some bit of technical information was playing hard-to-get. Google/DDG can't find info on this ancient electrophoresis power supply? Oh look, kagi found a document describing these units that was written for some higher education institution that used them, and now I know they won't work for my application. Had similar things happen several times before I just started using kagi by default for those searches.

hotbot! now there's a name I haven't heard in a while! that was the first search engine I used regularly. it was the perfect place to find warcraft 2 cheats and magic the gathering deck ideas

From the ~5 search queries I have done so far, it's not like "wow" but more like "yes".

Yes, in many ways, such as the proportion of items on the first page of a query response that are relevant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evaluation_measures_(informati...

I would love to see more analysis on result quality. Probably a good deal of it is subjective. I do miss Google's Bard AI results. Bard AI is fine, and it generally adds some value to the search results. I don't know how I feel about the ethics of AI in search results, mainly AI summarizing results and people not visiting the actual content. Also, I don't like how Bard is only available in Chrome, as Bing's AI is only available in Edge. I really doubt there is a technical reason AI results can't be in other browser search results. I'm sure it is just a ecosystem lockin play. I usually use Firefox so I don't get AI in results anyway.

Maybe I'm simplifying, and I haven't used it. But it looks like you are basically paying for an anonymized (maybe, since you need an account) proxy to google. https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... Getting 10 year old flickr images is great, I'm sure. But probably the most relevant search results still come from google.

you can try it out. They give you 100 free searches.

another happy user here. yes it does!

Kagi is as good as google used to be. It doesn't have that same 'wow' effect because we've all experienced what good search is.

It feels like turning on your ad blocker. It's what web search was supposed to be all along. It isn't that it's better than Google, Google is just so much worse now.

I'm extremely happy with it. Just the ability to block Pinterest from my results forever is worth the price.