Tag: Browsers

From February up until now, I have been using a paid search engine, Kagi. Two weeks ago, I canceled my subscription to try giving DuckDuckGo - or maybe another search engine - a go. However, I still find the search results quite lacking!

For the past years, I have been trying to avoid using Google services. There are many reasons for that, and I’m definitely not the best example, since I’m still a Chrome user. However, Google Search is something I try to use very rarely. And it’s not as if it’s as good as it was before.

When I begun this journey, I started by just using DuckDuckGo, since that was what everyone suggested. Nevertheless, I don’t think DuckDuckGo gives me the best results, or the results I want, most of the times. I got into the habit of appending !g to the search query and banging my way into Google.

Until Kagi. Kagi is a paid-for search engine. You pay a specific amount of money per month, and then you can do… well… searches. The argument is that if you’re paying for it, you’re not the product anymore. And I must say: Kagi actually gave me good results time and time again. And my habit of appending a Google bang to the query faded away.

Until two weeks ago. I was reading Kevin’s post about changing technologies and he mentioned he had canceled his Kagi subscription and replaced it with DuckDuckGo. He mentions the results have been good. So I decided to try, because, why not? I agree that paying around 10$/m for Kagi is too much, considering I don’t use any of their other services.

Now I’m back at DuckDuckGo and the intrinsic habit of banging my way into Google is back, sadly. An example: yesterday I searched for “hout pizza”, which is a pizzeria here in Eindhoven. DuckDuckGo gave me first some 5 results about hout (wood) and not related to pizza at all. At the same time, Kagi/Google/Startpage’s first result was, indeed, the pizzeria here in Eindhoven.

And this sort of thing happens quite often. DuckDuckGo is yet to give me satisfactory results. However, Kagi is slightly too expensive for a search engine. If I were using their other products, such as translation, Kagi Assistant, etc, maybe the price would be worth it. But for search alone, it’s very hard to justify.

I think I am going to try out Startpage, which is also a privacy-focused search engine based in The Netherlands. I’ve heard about them before, but I have never used them really.

On Web Browsers

Web Browsers are also intrinsically annoying, at least the ones I use: Google Chrome and Safari. Google Chrome has a set list of default search engines and adding a new one is cumbersome, but possible. With Safari, however, you need an extension which will redirect the requests for a standard search engine to another service. Very annoying.

I understand Apple has not been the biggest fan of customization, but it’s a search engine, it should not be that complicated to use a different one. The EU has demanded so many things from Apple, from opening the App Store to letting use other browsers as their defaults, but changing the default search engine to anything custom? No.

And yes, I could use a different browser on my iPhone, but Safari works just fine, and I have no other issues besides setting the search engine. On the laptop I do want to use something other than Chrome, but I’ve had my issues with Firefox before, and Safari always gives me the vibes of being too minimalistic, but I have never tried it with for a long period.

I am now going to try changing the browsers in my devices to use Startpage as their default search engine, and hope for the best. Maybe it will be so good that I won’t change back to Kagi. But I could very well go back to Kagi, depending on how it goes.

I’m actually very interested in which browsers and search engines others are using, so feel free to reply to this post on any of the social media where it has been shared or send me an e-mail!