it is probably a good idea to avoid making your new website sufficiently irritating that a search engine uses it as the first example of its URL rewrite function
A redirect looks like this:
^https://reddit.com/|https://old.reddit.com/
https://help.kagi.com/kagi/features/redirects.html#redirect-syntax
I think I've been held back by the fact that Safari doesn't have direct support for anything but "the big five"1, but I am going to be giving their extension with equivalent functionality a go on all my devices, with DuckDuckGo as the fallback
as one of the people who's been paying for her email (in spite of how crazy that seemed) for nearly ten years2 I think it's time to start seriously thinking about paying for my search engine
DuckDuckGo is good, and I respect it a lot, but search in general is rotting. abusive sites with a budget abound and ad-supported search business models seem unable to cope with this paradigm, DDG included
so I'm going to try paying Kagi for a while, and see how it grabs me, we'll see how that goes
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the built-in list, at the time of writing, is DuckDuckGo, Google, Yahoo, Bing or Ecosia. All of which are ad-supported. Really wish Apple would bring back pluggability to search, what happened to Sherlock plugins, folks? am I right?
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seriously, my Fastmail trial started in May 2013, and I started paying in June. wow. if you want a discount (and to give me a little discount) you can sign up at https://ref.fm/u11157181
Stats
- Since the 2nd I've done 282 searches across 4 devices
- I've used
!g(to retry a search with Google) 4 times - I've used Kagi images 6 times
- My Kagi CSS is customised to always show advanced search options, hide the cloud animation, and change the base font stack
- I have blocked 2 domains from my results
- 3 domains have been de-emphasised in my results
- 2 domains have automatic redirects to optimised/cleaned alternatives
- I set up a custom bang for cohost
Thoughts
- So far I am not really sure what lenses are good for
- Search results are broadly solid, feels as good or better than DuckDuckGo's
- I really like the "blast from the past" search results (things scraped from the wayback machine) but I wish it were possible to target that with a search
- The currency conversion widget is kind of weird and doesn't inspire much confidence in the few times I've tried it
- I don't think there's anything tempting me to stop the experiment at this point, which is good because I prepaid a year of it lmao
Stats
- Since the 2nd of January I've done 1,001 searches across 6 devices
- I've used
!gor!gi(to retry a search with Google) 8 times - I've used Kagi images 36 times
- I have blocked 2 domains from my results
- 8 domains have been de-emphasised in my results
- 3 domains have been emphasised in my results
Thoughts
- Still don't really know what lenses are for.
- Result quality remains pretty pleasing. The lack of ads and invasive nonsense is fantastic. I feel like I have resorted to Google more sparingly than in my time using DuckDuckGo.
- With one month of data, I am using slightly north of 100% the costs I am paying for per month, according to their billing report. I wonder how this will trend over more time.
- The AI-powered instant answer stuff is less overconfident than Google's, but still not really that useful. I would rather you use your CPU time to find the source for me rather than try to pluck out context which will probably not be right.
- I don't really have more deep thoughts, I am just sort of content with the results. I think the hit rate of just 8 times resorting to Google out of 1,001 searches is pretty good. And to be fair, a lot of those were me looking for something really obscure.