> I don't use the domain blacklisting at all, encounter spam ~never, and almost always get what I'm looking for in the top 5 results.
I encountered spam with Kagi half a dozen times. It was labeled "trustworthy". It is 100x worse than just seeing spam. Having to pay for it just adds insult to injury.
If there is a search engine it will be gamed. What we need is not trust the algorithm but have a good query mechanism.
> Obviously people's mileage may vary, but if anyone else is reading this and hasn't tried Kagi: you should
If your searches are uncomplicated and you are okay relying on algorithm without thinking, absolutely. buy it for your grandma and set it as her default search? 100%. But if you are a power Google user, you will be disappointed.
I thought you use Kagi. It's the label on the right of search result. When I used Kagi it could change color depending on how good Kagi thinks it is (I also remember a bar indicator under it but maybe something changed again). You click on it and you can downrank/uprank the site. If I wanted to really have only good results I would have to do it every day. I'm sure it was good for Kagi because they used it for their crowd sourced ranking but I didn't feel good doing it and paying for the privilege.
I left after I noticed that Google gets me mostly the same results. Plus I have more privacy and less tracking across all web if I don't need to leave private mode.
> literally no one is gaming a search engine with like 0.01% market share.
Kagi is a front-end for google and other search engines. Gaming google and bing is literally gaming kagi.
I encountered spam with Kagi half a dozen times. It was labeled "trustworthy". It is 100x worse than just seeing spam. Having to pay for it just adds insult to injury.
If there is a search engine it will be gamed. What we need is not trust the algorithm but have a good query mechanism.
> Obviously people's mileage may vary, but if anyone else is reading this and hasn't tried Kagi: you should
If your searches are uncomplicated and you are okay relying on algorithm without thinking, absolutely. buy it for your grandma and set it as her default search? 100%. But if you are a power Google user, you will be disappointed.