Another Periodic Suggestion to Try, Just Try, Switching to Kagi for Search

upstart writes:

Another Periodic Suggestion to Try, Just Try, Switching to Kagi for Search:

Aaron Pressman, writing earlier this month in The Boston Globe, "Why I Abandoned Google Search After 27 Years-and What I'm Using Instead":

The UK now requires travelers from America to obtain an electronictravel authorization, or ETA. I wasn't sure of the exact name ofthe ETA, so I just searched "travel to UK."

The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a linkthat looked like the official UK government site. It was not; theofficial site was lower, below an AI summary, some sponsoredlinks, and other junk on the results page. Luckily for me, I didget a legitimate travel pass-but the site I picked overchargedme by about $70.

I don't know what the name for this sort of thing is, but it's like a semi-scam. There are similar services to what Pressman ran into here for expedited passport renewals, for example-third-party companies that present themselves as official partners of the government that charge you extra for a service. But they just handle for you what you could just as easily do yourself, if you found the right place on the web to do it. A complete scam would be taking your money and giving you nothing (or a bogus document) in return. These semi-scams deliver the thing they're promising, but charge you more than you should pay.

[...] After I learned my lesson, I did some research in search of bettersearch. People I trust on the Internet, including the Appleblogger John Gruber and novelist Cory Doctorow,recommended a new search engine called Kagi.

[...] I keep trying to emphasize that I recommend switching to Kagi not because it's more private (although it clearly is), not as a protest against Google (although for some, switching could be), not as a rejection of search ads dominating the top of Google's results (although that's true too), but simply because Kagi's results are clearly better.

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.

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