Kagi

I couldn't take it anymore: the AI-generated content at the top of Google search results.

The "AI Overview" from Gemini is almost always wrong or unhelpful. Even on the occasions when it's useful, it's often just a more verbose rewording of one of the top organic search results and takes longer to load. Worst of all, there's no way to control or disable it.

I tried DuckDuckGo for a while and it was OK. But occasionally, I'd have to fallback on Google to get better results.

Then I tried Kagi. And it's been great. Lee Hutchinson's article in Ars Technica prompted me to check it out. Kagi is a subscription-based metasearch engine that gives you more control and more features.

AI

Kagi provides a Quick Answer feature that produces an AI summary which always includes links to the source material.

• A Quick Answer can be automatically triggered by including a ? at the end of the search term
• For other searches, the results page includes a Quick Answer button

The automatic Quick Answer feature can be disabled in the settings.

And if you never want to see the Quick Answer button, you can hide it by adding this custom CSS in the Appearance settings:

.quick-answer-trigger-link {
  display: none;
}

Bang Searches

Bangs are searches that start with a !. These are particularly helpful for narrow searches. These are some programming-related examples:

• !rb String#gsub - Takes you directly to the Ruby documentation page for the method (thanks to recent improvements to RDoc)
• !rails before_action - Takes you to the Rails documentation page for the method
• !railsguides migrations - Returns documentation found only in the official Rails Guides
• !gem csv - Takes you to the RubyGems search page
• !gh stimulus - Takes you to the GitHub repository search page

Ranking and Blocking

You can personalize results by ranking domains higher or lower. This can be useful for boosting sites with high quality answers like StackOverflow and lowering sites with a lot of noise like Reddit.

You can also block domains from showing up in your search results which is perfect for getting rid of garbage from sites like:

• APIdock - Google results for code often includes APIdock pages for super old versions and long-deprecated code
• Quora - Google results regularly link to Quora pages that are just unattributed content stolen from Stack Exchange sites

No Ads

Kagi is free of ads and trackers and they down-rank other sites that use them heavily. You don't have to scroll past a bunch of unwanted sponsored content at the top of the results.

Cons

One downside is that it's a little bit clumsy to get Kagi set up as the default search engine across all platforms. It requires some manual configuration or a browser extension.

Kagi has been criticized for using the Russian search engine Yandex as one of their sources. Founder Vladimir Prelovac's response is that:

• Kagi strives to be impartial, similar to Wikipedia or a library
• Each query uses ~40 sources, including Kagi's own indexes, and blends results to mitigate bias from any one search index
• About 2% of their costs go to Yandex