With all these comments about how Kagi is so much better than Google, I feel like I am living in a alternate world. My experience has been the exact opposite. I've been having to use !g so often on Kagi I turned it off as my default search engine. The thing is I really want to love Kagi, but can't. It just seems inferior in terms of parsing my search queries and returning relevant results.

Let me give an example. On Kagi, I searched up "Overcoming addiction to Reddit". On Kagi, most of the top results are actually just Reddit posts about drug addiction / addiction in general and not Reddit addiction [1]. If you scroll down, the is a result about internet addiction, but that isn't what I asked for either. Only once you get to the very bottom do you actually get links about Reddit addiction itself. Even then, there aren't that many.

If you do the same query on Google, I get much more results that are actually about Reddit addiction [2]. On top of that, the relevant results are way closer to the top than on Kagi. It even includes high quality links like a Hacker News post on Reddit addiction. I believe Kagi included the same link, but it was hidden all the way on the third page as opposed to being somewhat near the top on Google. Don't get me wrong, Google's results aren't perfect and it has a lot of irrelevant stuff show up in my query about Reddit addiction. But it's still better than Kagi.

My theory is that Kagi just saw the words "overcoming addiction" and "Reddit" and assumed I wanted to look for links about addiction in general on Reddit. Basically it's almost like it did "overcoming addiction site:reddit.com" for the top results. Albeit, after the top results it does show links from other sources. Meanwhile, it seems Google did a better job at parsing the query and realizing I was looking up a specific type of addiction, a Reddit addiction. Kagi did not do this.

My next problem with Kagi is just the lack of results in general. It seems Kagi likes to return a limited number of results per search. It seems it usually gives 20-30 results and sometimes gives more (~70 results) if you give it a very generic query. The problem with this is it makes Kagi terrible for research. In daily life, I never even read past the first few pages on Google. But when researching a niche topic for a paper, you sometimes need to go way past the first page to find what you're looking for. This might be because when doing research on something vague or niche it's hard to get accurate matches on the first page of search. As a result, having a large number of search result pages in general is useful for when this happens. But Kagi simply doesn't do this. It's limit on how many results it returns just kills the ability for you to actually go more in-depth without issuing a modified search query. I seriously doubt Kagi's index is literally so small it can only return around 70 something results at max, so I just have to think this is some self-imposed limitation which ultimately harms the search quality.

Another problem I have with Kagi are lenses. Lenses get hyped up by them, but in practice I found them utterly terrible. I searched up Lo Mein without lenses on and my first results were some pretty high quality recipes. I then turned on the recipe lens and the quality noticeably decreased. Instead of returning Lo Mein recipes from actual recipe sites, it instead returns a Reddit post that links to a gif of someone making Lo Mein. Issue is that gif is actually on gfycat which is shut down. So the top result is useless. The rest of the results aren't even Lo Mein recipes, but instead chicken recipes for instance. So in the process of trying to use lenses to increase my search quality, it actually made it worse.

Also, a tiny nit is that Kagi isn't as good at getting quick answers. If I look up a question on Google, it will usually display some quick summary at the top with the answer to the question. Kagi has quick answer too, but you have to manually click on it to get Kagi to generate the quick answer. I get they're a startup trying to save money, but this is just another reason for me to use Google over Kagi.

As a whole, I haven't found Kagi to be useful at all like many commenters claim it is. I really wanted Kagi to work out as again I love the idea of Kagi. But ultimately, I can't justify using it over Google because the quality has just been so much worse in my experience. Ultimately, I am paying money for Kagi, yet I am getting a lower quality product than Google which is free. At that point, it doesn't make sense for me to continue with Kagi.

1. https://kagi.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+reddit

2. https://www.google.com/search?q=overcoming+addiction+to+redd... (Google may show different results to you because Google might be customizing results based on past searches)