I've been quite liking Kagi (paid). No search manipulation, no ads, good results, no tracking, no tying search to accounts, you can modify results yourself (remove pintrist, facebool results; pin Wikipedia results to the top of results; boost sites in your results that you use heavily, etc).

I've been using it for like, 5 months now? Rarely need to use bangs, the search is pretty damn good.

[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 4 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Kagi seems to be the real deal. I'd say anecdotally it cuts my searches in half (If I had to do 4-6 searches to find something previously, now it's 2-3 max). Sometimes I will find myself accidently on DDG and I'll think, "Wow, why are these results all over the place?" DDG still edges out Google and Bing (actually I think it uses Bing as a backend for certain tasks).

[–] breakingcups@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I tried Kagi for a while but it wasn't as good as Google or DDG for me, especially in my native language. Too bad, I'd love paying for search.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 2 points 11 months ago

I'm in the same boat. The results from Kagi just weren't good.

[–] sbv@sh.itjust.works 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

I tried Kagi briefly and the results were as good as google. Searches for stuff near me, programming questions, and travel related stuff were not helpful.

I live in Canada, so I wonder if there's some sort of regional prioritization.

[–] wreckedcarzz@lemmy.world 2 points 11 months ago

I have searched for stuff in AHK, VB.net (helping a friend poke at code), and Lua (game stuff for myself), and it's been okay, but I don't code 'real' things anymore, kinda burnt out as a hobby a few years ago. I'm stateside.