I paid for Kagi for a couple of months a year ago, but found it was not worth it for me - mainly because it is so bad at local search but also because I kept getting mixed signals from them about their business ethics.
I recently had to do some internet research after some personal health issues. I wasn’t looking for diagnoses or advice but for factual things like what some of the medical terms mean, some meta-analysis of the population frequency of a particular syndrome and what the nature and effects of some of the likely drugs were.
Google was dangerously awful. It kept inserting AI summaries, even in the middle of search results. It constantly steered me away from the useful information (e.g. the British National Formulary - a free and extremely reliable source of pharmaceutical information or the national charities which provide excellent independent information) towards articles on all sorts of commercial sites and some very dubious ones (e.g. based on conspiracy theories that all medical information is designed to hurt you) Some of the AI summaries were OK but bland. Many were extremely over-confident and plain wrong, often with a bland disclaimer suggesting that AI could sometimes mislead.
I paid for a month of Kagi. It wasn’t perfect, with care needed to identify the provenance and authority of sites it listed, but it did reliably suggest the NHS information sources and the main charities involved in the field and it led me to the meta analysis I needed very quickly - all peer-reviewed, dated and from the source.
My real question is what use is a search engine that makes it harder to find what you are looking for?
Do a prompt asking it for gold tier sources for data and information about the health condition in question, and ask it to show you the sources and explain why it considers them gold standard. Review the sources manually and check you’re happy with them.
Save those sources as a resource to a new Project folder. Set a project instruction so that all queries only use the gold standard sources, and ask it to cite which source and when in replies.
From that point on, use that Project for all searches. All future searches will be limited to your manually selected sources, but you still get the benefit of simple AI summarising to your queries. You can also add new sources as you go, if new ones pop up.
Also worth noting that pubmed has an AI friendly API these days, so most AIs will let you do searches limited specifically to pubmed.
I have a Kagi trial till the end of September, but now I use DuckDuckGo mainly. It just works with some controls.
Kagi is not bad but it is not so good that I have to pay, and in my daily life I don’t always search. DuckDuckGo is not outstanding but improving a bit over years, which is better than nothing.
Google at least filters all AI generated websites but the results overall are like pushing me towards YouTube and social media. Most of the time I need facts but not opinions.
I still get good results from Google by not asking questions, but by giving it key words and websites to search, and telling it what words/websites to avoid. Refine Google searches
If the OP had concerns about Kagi’s morals, certainly don’t look up Perplexity’s.
It’s not necessarily the answers, it’s the constant changes to minimise the ability to identify what is a result, an ad or AI, when a search brings you 5 or 6 true results on a page.
I use DuckDuckGo, and sometimes switch to Google if required, but I rarely have to these days.
You are asking to restrict the where as well as the what. The AI search process is therefore to be done somewhat in this order …
rank the accuracy and integrity of sites that provide factual information about “XYZ”
search only the top two highest ranked sites in this list for factual information about “XYZ”
summarize the factual results
Think of a general search engine as a beagle (dog). Untrained in an open pasture, a beagle will happily lead you to the biggest smelling piles all over the place in the pasture. Train the beagle to find only mushrooms, and restrict it to a place that has only edible mushrooms.
Or recognize that you may have to buy a Lagotto Romagnolo and perhaps move to a specific region of the country when your desire is to find the best truffles.
The Google result is clearly superior. I was able to get a rough idea of the topic (a Spanish conquistador myth, and a modern cultural intrigue) by a very quick scan over the fragments of information. The pics are helpfully illustrative (DDG barely showed any). The information density of DDG feels excessive; I don’t know what to do with the unfragmented wall of text.
The AI overview by Google is misleading (there was no “American Southwest” at the time) but it’s still useful information — a headup for what I would be looking at. And it can be turned off if you want, anyway.
For this particular type of search, I think Google Search is better than both chatbots (too obtuse) and a direct search on Wikipedia (too formal, and the search operation can be quite slow).
