(In your opinion)
I’m using DDG, but I’m not satisfied with it. The quality of answers is subpar and I find myself switching to google or LLMs when I’m researching some things where community opinion matter (for some reason reddit and forums are undervalued by DDG algorithm).
I could try daily driving alternatives, but I know I will be biased and it will noticably slow down my workflows.
I tested it and there’ll be months where I do 400 queries and months where there’s maybe 200. Since it doesn’t carry over, I’ll simply have to use alternatives on a regular basis. Especially across all devices (all my work is on a computer, most of the time with unfamiliar technologies as the customer has a new project for us to pentest), I’ll be out of queries most months. My employer is too scrooge to pay for our primary internal communication tool (we pay for various crap where it’s mandatory, even if we barely need it, but not for a donation-run hosted service that we heavily use). They’re never going to subsidise the searches I do during work time so long as competitors are “free”. So I’ll be stuck with other engines regardless, or have to pay as much as for a streaming service. It just seems like a lot, especially when part of it goes to Russia and burn-the-world AI bros
Well I’m not trying to push you, you make your own choice, but you could just not use it at work (or only use it at work) and have something different on other devices.
Yeah I get that, but I guess it depends on how you count. Kagi has some of their own index, but mostly it’s a search aggregator (like searx). They pay for queries to google etc, and use the Russian Yandex for Russian results because it’s apparently the only one that gets good results in Russian. From my understanding, not searching in Russian/Russia location wouldn’t trigger a search to Yandex so wouldn’t give them money, so I guess it’s more a principle thing than literal money to Yandex/Russia.
For AI it’s the same, they pay per query. No queries means no money to AI companies, so it’s more about principles than actual your money going to them (if you don’t use it). Kagi doesn’t force AI results on you (by default it will show AI if you end your search with a question mark, but you can disable that too).