This year has been extraordinary for Kagi ( https://kagi.com ).
Kagi is a paid alternative to ad-supported search engines like Google and DuckDuckGo. It has recently revised its pricing model, reducing the cost for a plan with unmetered searches from $25 per month to $10.
Kagi boasts the following (and more) features:
Blocking or boosting specific domains in your search results
"Lenses", which are individual setting profiles (e.g. region locks, domain whitelists) that can be applied to search queries
All of the Bangs that DuckDuckGo has (e.g. type "!yt" in front of your query to immediately search on youtube.com)
Universal Summarizer, which works with any website, PDF document, YouTube video and more
This blog post goes into full details about Kagi's capabilities.
The results aren't always perfect, but its more of fighting with SEO.
With DDG I'd often have to switch back to Google for a query. Now when switching from Kagi to Google when I can't find a result the results are usually worse. For a niche topic I'm vaguely familiar with I'll usually do ChatGPT so I can get the proper search terms and then find what I want on Kagi.
It tends to improve the more you adjust your personalized weights. I was pretty lazy with that the first month and found it slightly subpar compared with Google. Now it seems way better.
Lots of UI customizations if you don't like a particular feature. As an example I don't like their Listicles feature (groups top X type of results). Mostly because that content is poor quality. Disabling the feature just removes those crap results that would go in the widget which is a bonus for me.
The ability to switch lenses (topic contexts) that you can customize those result weights for instead of one global context Google assigns you.
I wish they had a better solution for anonymous searching. There is a pay as you go API I could use with a second account funded from cleaned bitcoin. Would be great if I could use the website though from a pay as you go funded source.
Very cool. I joined on September 4th and am still on my 100 free search trial. I think the $5 plan will be just fine for me and i get to pay in crypto. Win win.
I wanted to use the text box to provide some info about what Kagi actually is, since the title alone doesn't explain. What should I have done differently in your opinion?
Great news! I was always getting nervously close to my 1000 every month, which made me use bangs more. Now I can just type in my query and not worry about it.