"testing their free tier did not seem to produce much different results compared to using google"
So Kagi gave you ads, sponsored links, AI generated answers etc. as top results? =)
It shouldn't, or you've registered for a scam site. That's the difference. With Kagi it feels like I'm using Google from 10 years ago. On Kagi I can go "searchword -notthisone +thshastobethere inurl:forum" and it actually works.
You can also manually downrank sites in the settings so that they never appear in your results (as I've done for pinterest etc that are 99% crap, but have excellent SEO). Or boost sites with reliably good results.
> So Kagi gave you ads, sponsored links, AI generated answers etc. as top results? =)
No, I did not register for kaggi.search if that's what you are implying.
This was about ~12 months ago, so no, the AI-generated summaries were not a thing you would expect to see at that time, outside of ocassional A/B experiments. Now maybe my expectation is different to yours. I'd expect I dont have to do much tweaking or downranking at all. My pre-2019 google experience had been roughly "i type in 3-4 words" and one of the first three links is exactly what I searched for. Kagi did not deliver that, much as I would love it to. But with Kagi relying mainly on google search index, it seems to me there is only so much they can do anyway, apart from users ranking and downranking stuff...which I am not keen to do...
Actually Kagi uses Bing and Yandex as the backend, not google.
It also tends to surface niche sites more than Google for me.
It also takes maybe 30 seconds to downrank a site and you'll never see it again, unlike Google that will keep giving you shitty "review" sites, Pinterest etc as results.
I know about Yandex ... but I am fairly sure I read the bulk of its search is based on googles index. I know downranking is not much work, but I just dislike the idea of having to work for it.
So Kagi gave you ads, sponsored links, AI generated answers etc. as top results? =)
It shouldn't, or you've registered for a scam site. That's the difference. With Kagi it feels like I'm using Google from 10 years ago. On Kagi I can go "searchword -notthisone +thshastobethere inurl:forum" and it actually works.
You can also manually downrank sites in the settings so that they never appear in your results (as I've done for pinterest etc that are 99% crap, but have excellent SEO). Or boost sites with reliably good results.