I am happy for alternatives, otherwise I guess Kagi wouldn't improve so fast in areas I care about.
I think many people whose lives don't revolve around these things (as in your finances/mortgage are not dependent on google search) get weird magical views about search engines where it's sorta like a modern delphic oracle where the magic works as long as you believe in it. Of course I have the opposite problem where Google is angry chthonic god to be supplicated/scorned.
Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
Kagi is pretty clear about how they do what they do: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-sources.htm.... You're half right, except that Google is not a vertical that they leverage for their index. Their solution works for me, but I'm also a techy. Anecdotally, my partner uses it, and she is not a techy.
> Oh well, I do know I will not be worshipping a new god that cannot even destroy the abominations sitting at the top of the rankings.
The only way this statement applies (to me) is if you can optimize for Kagi. The only way I can think of to do that is organically, but admittedly I haven't put much effort into it because the magic of Kagi's flavor of search is that it puts me in near proximity to information density and sources that I already trust. The real proving grounds for Kagi are a decade out.
>Kagi is known for delivering a unique flavor of high-quality search results, sourced from our own web index (internally named "Teclis") and news index (internally named "TinyGem").
The marketing at least is pretty good -- I haven't seen this many committed devotees since the iPhone was announced.
But here on the ground, I can type a few queries and reveal that Kagi is the same shit as Google. Perhaps you are seeing some manually adjusted queries?
P.S. there are lots of other concerns about Kagi too, I'm just talking about the search https://hackers.town/@lori/112255132348604770
Here on the ground in Norway I just say "lucky you" if Google serves the same results as Kagi.
My experience is Google expands my search terms beyond recognition and I am absolutely and utterly fed up with starting to read an article about a problem I searched for, getting a result from a trustworthy site, starting to read only to realize Google secretly behind my back expanded my search from "unpopular-ancient-javascript-framework-from-2021" to "currently-popular-js-framework-with-kinda-similar-name".
My time is valuable. Not having to babysit my search engine is something I happily pay for.
Could probably get my employer to pay for it too.
If Google by some miracle has you in an experimental group where they don't mess with your queries, or if you have time to babysit it - more power to you.
And this is how I know you haven't used Kagi at all.
I guess the identical search results in my niche are an example of convergent enshittification of both Kagi and Google then
