Google is quite sticky indeed. Having tried a few alternatives, I keep coming back to it because it helps me get things done the fastest. It would be relatively easy for Apple to switch their default search engine, but quite difficult to switch it to something better. That said I hope they do, and I hope to see more and better search engine competitors in the future.
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Kagi and You.com are way better than Google. Searches are usually within 1 page result unlike Google these days peppered with so many ads that the thing I look for usually at page 10-20 range. The only downside is they are paid service. Google stickyness is because it is free using us as product just like Meta. If you forho it being free, Kagi and You.com are great alternative. DDG is also free but due to way it monetize, it lacks a lot of features to what Kagi and You provides.
I'll look into You.com. I gave Kagi a shot recently, paid for a month and set it as my default. To be honest, the results weren't good enough for me and I ended up cancelling my subscription. I am willing to pay that much for my search engine, but it has to do better than Google.
I use a strict adblocker, so finding what I'm looking for on the Google search results page is actually quite easy for me. I recommend checking out uBlock Origin[0] if you haven't already.
[0] https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock
Edit: You.com is a mildly interesting product, but not what I'm looking for at all. It has more ads than Google, and the default is to send my query to OpenAI and wait for it to spit some text out. No thanks
> I gave Kagi a shot recently, paid for a month and set it as my default. To be honest, the results weren't good enough for me and I ended up cancelling my subscription. I am willing to pay that much for my search engine, but it has to do better than Google.
That's surprising to me. I find Kagi's results to be better than Google most of the time. Sometimes they are really exceptional, with searches I thought would be tough taking me straight to the right page. Maybe it depends on what you tend to search for.
I'm glad to hear it works well for others, and I'd like to give it another shot sometime. I use Google to find relevant sources for research, and documentation for coding projects. In my experience, Kagi just wasn't able to keep up.
There are other benefits to Kagi that I do miss though. I liked being able to permanently disclude domains I am not interested in, and to boost the relative importance of others.
When you experienced a bad result, did you do a direct comparison with the equivalent Google search?
I found myself questioning some of Kagi's search results when I first started using it and sometimes thought a search result was of poor quality, but whenever that happened, I did a direct comparison with Google whose result was equally bad.
I've now used Kagi for almost six months and have never found a search where Google provided better quality results. Except for image search.
I tried kagi with the free trial offer and liked it a lot. However, i was not converted to a paying customer.
I don't actually really know why. There is nothing technically that makes me hesitate. When my trial was over, and I stared at the form for my credit card I kinda went "nah I'm good. I'll go back to google for now, i can switch when i really need to". I never really needed to.
I converted to paying on kagi the promise that the first tier was enough for most users. It was not, and I didn't considered I would be a heavy user before hand. 2nd tier price is not acceptable to me since the UI/UX is not polished enough (search input reset is not something that should slip in production ever). I also had to revert to google for shopping results, kagi is suppose to have some, but not for me apparently.
I might try again is the raise the search count on first tier or provide services I care for on the second tier.
They recently changed the pricing. It's now $5/mo for 300 searches or $10/mo for unlimited searches.
I'm on the $10 because it seems I do about 600 searches a month.
For me it's a bargain, I could never go back to Google.
Same. I was around 600 too. And I hope to never go back to Google.
You.com seems to be an AI assistant, not a search engine?