I much prefer Kagi to Google (and DuckDuckGo et al). Often the first page of Google consists solely of SEO rubbish. Being able to block and rank domains is also useful.
For straightforward answers and navigating to websites, I often use what is the default in browser that I happen to use at that time.
I use DDG, FF, and Bromite on my smartphone. Sometimes Brave, too. I have Brave as my secondary browser (FF as the main, LibreWolf for personal stuff) on my daily driver as well.
I used Brave Search and DDG a lot. Nothing can go wrong with them if all I am asking is the capital of Belgium or trying to navigate to a subreddit.
With special, not so straightforward searches, I rely on You and Kagi.
I really appreciate You's different kinds of search results and grouping them. They are clear that they use some kind of AI model to tailor search results, and I have an account there.
I really like Kagi for showing me sites that I wasn’t even aware of. I can boost or shove down sites. I turned off Quora and Pinterest right away. No extensions, no scripts. Love that.
As I said, Google’s adbiz is in direct conflict with its Search division. Search should show the best result for the Searcher. Ad div would want the pages to be shown that are crawling, infesting with Google Adsense ad. When more of these pages are visited, they have better metrics to lure more people to Adsense thus making $$$.
