Kagi Search Stats
For a couple of weeks, I’ve been using the Kagi search engine instead of Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave or others. I’ve found the results to be quite good. More often than not, it manages to surface results that don’t make it into Google. I still consider it a trial though. It’s main distinguishing feature being that it’s a paid service, I still have to see if I can get by with the 300 searches per month on the smallest plan.
The idea of paying for a quality service appeals to me. The incentives of a service and its users are usually aligned this way. And there are already features I’ve always wished for, like raising, lowering and blocking results based on domain names. There’s so much SEO crap polluting results (and it’s only going to get worse with the “AI” machine learning text generation), being able to block common offenders is great. There’s lots of stuff that just annoys me and never want to see, ever.
Kagi publishes anonymous statistics of which domains are blocked and promoted the most. It makes for an interesting, although not exactly surprising, reading.
It appears to paint a rather clear picture who the majority of the service’s users are: dudes working with/in tech.