Technology

Comparing the pricing on a "search value" basis is compelling, but I'll be damned if I can't find concrete details on what they actually do differently. Just looks like a lot of marketing-speak.

Comparing search engines is not easy. I went down the rabbit hole and concluded Kagi is the best right now. A search engine has one primary function. Everything else is icing. That is to find the best result as fast as possible. As their incentive is to find you the best result, not the result which pays Google the most. I find relevant results more often, and much less spam. That's the value proposition.

They also have great features like the ability to block and rank domains, and a kind of filter feature which focuses on certain kinds of information you're looking for.

As for ranking, no search engine uses humans to rank results. There are billions more pages going online every day. It would take the entire world's population working on nothing but that to accomplish. So the magic is in the algorithm and how data sources are combined. As above, Kagi's motivation is to provide good results, and I think they're succeeding. I'm sure Google could provide amazing results to us, but that's not profitable. Of course, humans review the algorithms and test them and improve them, and Kagi appears very good at this.

FYI they have a $5 tier which includes 300 searches a month, and this is enough to cover most users. You might be surprised if you actually track your habits over time. You could start on that tier and upgrade if it's insufficient.