Shameless Kagi shill here - the company's leadership is shaky and has a recent tendency to focus dumb AI things, but their core product is 2012 Google. It _feels_ even better than 2012 Google. Combine a quality search engine w/ the fact that I can walk from funding them the moment they look to ads for revenue and I'm a very happy customer.
Can confirm, gave up Google Search + Gmail about 6 months ago and it's literally improved my performance at work. It's impressive what is missed out on when an ad is papered over everything you read.
My experience of YouTube was transformed. I can watch a group of videos and they just run right after each other. The worst was when somehow I would get one of the 1 hour videos and I wouldn't realize it until several minutes were done.
Drew used to be a hugely inspiring developer to me, but recently he's spent more time politicizing than anything else. I find it difficult to understand people who nosily theorize a lot and build little, which is what Drew has become. FOSS works well when you have a large margin to allow other ideas to fly around, even if you personally disagree with those ideas.
If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere. I use Kagi where Bing used to be, for technical reference lookups. It's excellent at putting API docs front-and-center, which means I can alt-tab back to my text editor that much faster. What I love about Kagi is how little of my time and attention the tool requires.
Also my own anecdata - the privacy concerns are a red herring, because the utility of knowing everything you've typed into your PC is diminished when ad surface area no longer exists. I like that Kagi has a privacy focus, but them losing it would not cause me to stop paying for the service as long as the quality was the same or better.
> If your searches are this descriptive then yes, I'd expect useless results everywhere
Y'all have a hard on for knowing specifically what I'm searching for, for some reason, don't ya?
I've been a software engineer for over a decade. I'm self taught. I've worked at some of the largest websites in the world. I owe my entire career to my ability to search for shit I don't know and finding results that literally teach me how to program. In a way, I owe my entire career to Google's search results that used to be top notch. The point is, I know how search used to be, and I know now that it sucks complete ass for me. I know how to search for the proper keywords because I wouldn't have my career without it so you should trust me when I say it's not user error, it's the search results, and stop asking for specific search terms when I'm guaranteeing you 100% the issue is not me. If I sucked at searching I wouldn't be on this site typing this message right now, I'd still be working in a factory.
By that logic, life itself can never be popular. Everyone in the world makes/has access to a non-zero amount of money, and where it goes is our collective human decision for how the world should operate. You're spending money right now, because of your opportunity cost!
Kagi v Google, in terms of "How do you operate as an organization wrt the world?"?
Kagi wins hands-down. I couldn't care less about the privacy angle, the QUALITY is amazing. It's like traveling back to 2008, and for $10/mo that's a sweet deal.
I hate to be that guy, but the vast majority of people using "VPN"s are actually using Proxies. A VPN connects a laptop at starbucks to a printer at the office so you can print something. A Proxy forwards requests on your behalf to web servers and returns results.
Modern VPNs are marketed as such because people love the "P" part without realizing that... they already had that with SSL.
Not OP but I do something similar, because I know each ad I see costs someone $$$. This leads to odd behavior like making sure I let youtube ads play for their full duration and I'll usually click on sponsor links + their pages enough to trigger the first flag of a sales pipeline, ensuring the company responsible for the ad pays as much as possible for it.
