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

Monday, 28 April 2025

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 electronic travel authorization, or ETA. I wasn’t sure of the exact name of the ETA, so I just searched “travel to UK.”

The results were all about obtaining an ETA and I picked a link that looked like the official UK government site. It was not; the official site was lower, below an AI summary, some sponsored links, and other junk on the results page. Luckily for me, I did get a legitimate travel pass — but the site I picked overcharged me 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.

I just tried searching for “expedited passport renewal” in Google and in Kagi. Kagi presents as its first response the US State Department’s “How to Get my U.S. Passport Fast” page. Google has that same link listed 7th, below the fold even on a desktop browser window on a 27-inch display, behind four sponsored links (all of which look pretty official but aren’t), an AI Overview (which itself includes, in its own AI Overview sidebar, another link to the same “How to Get my U.S. Passport Fast” page), and another U.S. State Department webpage with general instructions for applying for a passport.

In the second case, last week, I needed to book a hotel for a Passover trip to my brother’s in Connecticut. I knew there was a cool hotel we had stayed at before near his house but I couldn’t remember the name. I asked Google for hotels in the town where my brother lives. Sure enough, one of the top results appeared on first glance to be the official site of the hotel I wanted to book. It was not. Once again, somewhat nefarious search engine optimization techniques allowed a hotel aggregation site to jump ahead in the results. And this time my error was even more costly, to the tune of several hundred dollars in extra charges for two hotel rooms.

Google has worked hard to eliminate truly fraudulent websites from ending up in its results, and for that I am grateful. It is undeniable that, in both instances, I should have been a more careful consumer. But decades of relying on Google had taught me that I didn’t have to be.

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

I gave it a few test runs. A search for “travel to UK” brought up the UK government page to apply for an ETA as the first result. A search for a hotel in my brother’s town was topped by the official site of the hotel I wanted. So I switched all my default searches to 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.

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, 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. Your mileage may vary, of course, but for me, unlike with DuckDuckGo, I effectively never find myself redirecting the same search to Google because I wasn’t happy with the results from Kagi. For context on my search usage, my Kagi usage report shows that I perform 300–500 web search per month. (Kagi counts how often you search, for billing purposes, but does not keep a history of what you searched for.)

Paying for Kagi today feels a lot like paying for HBO back in the cable TV heyday. Part of the deal is that you are paying for ad-free service, yes. But you’re also paying for noticeably higher quality. There were no shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Larry Sanders Show on “free” TV channels, albeit with commercial interruptions. With HBO you got commercial-free entertainment and higher-quality shows and movies. Kagi is like that.¹ It’s that good. No ads, no unwanted AI (but very good AI results if you want — just end your query with a question mark), and better search results.