Seriously, Give Kagi a Try

Like, even if I use the magic &udm=14 parameter with Google search, to get “disenshittified” results from Google, I find I get better results from Kagi. When I know there’s one right answer (say, a specific article I remember reading and want to find again), Kagi is more likely than Google to list it first. If it’s a years-old article, Kagi is way more likely than Google to find it at all. For me, Google (and, alas, DuckDuckGo too) have largely stopped working reliably for finding not-recent stuff on the web. Not true with Kagi.

I used DuckDuckGo for years as my default search, and for those years, I found it largely on par with Google. But it felt like every once in a while — maybe, say, once or twice a month — DuckDuckGo would come up dry in its results. DuckDuckGo pioneered a trick they call Bangs. Include !g to any search terms, and instead of performing the search itself, DuckDuckGo will redirect that search to Google. They have a whole bunch of these Bangs — “!a” for Amazon search, “!nf” for Netflix. There are literally thousands of them (which of course they allow you to search for). The only one I ever really used though was !g, for redirecting my current search to Google because DuckDuckGo’s own results for the same terms was unsatisfying. My memory may not match with my actual usage, but like I said, I feel like I used this about once or twice a month for the several years I was using DuckDuckGo as my default search engine. Infrequently enough that it didn’t annoy me to the point of considering switching back to Google for default in-browser search, but frequently enough that I was annoyed enough to remember that I needed to use it at all.

Kagi supports Bangs too, including !g for Google web search. I can’t remember the last time I felt the need to try using it. It’s been months, many months. And, the last few times I’ve tried it, Google’s results were no more help than Kagi’s.