My Thoughts on Internet Search

This post is inspired by Steph Ango’s excellent blog, “Quality software deserves your hard-earned cash.” You should definitely give it a read. Also, just to be clear—this isn’t an ad. It may sound like one, but I’m just a really happy customer who wants to share something I genuinely appreciate. With that said, let’s kick things off with some background on Internet Search.

It may not be obvious at first, but Google Search is dying. Search results are cluttered with ads, affiliate-marketing-filled listicles, and AI-generated slop. I used to append keywords like Reddit or Stack Overflow just to get anything meaningful to show up on the first page. As the blog post above points out, “serving ads creates misaligned incentives for search engines.” You can’t simultaneously provide the best search results and optimize for the highest number of ad clicks. As a public company with an ad-based revenue model, Google is legally required to prioritize the latter.

I think part of Google’s continued dominance is that it’s so ingrained in our lives, we tend to overlook its flaws and adapt our behavior to compensate for them. Another major reason is that, historically, Google’s competitors have been even worse.

Everyone pays for search. The difference is whether you’re paying with attention, time, private data—or your wallet (The real cost of “free” search). I’m a Kagi convert. I switched from Google Search to DuckDuckGo in early 2023, then to Kagi this new year. I first heard about Kagi through Kev Quirk’s blog post. For those unfamiliar, Kagi has a novel business model: you periodically exchange your money for a service. Instead of monetizing users through advertising and affiliate marketing, Kagi charges you a monthly fee.¹

I have many thoughts on the state of search today and the general enshittification of “free” products, but that’s a topic for another day. Kagi’s value proposition was immediately appealing: search as a service I can pay for. I was skeptical at first, but Kagi’s search quality blew me away. I tried their free 100-search trial, burned through it in four days, and immediately saw the difference. In fact, I realized I couldn’t even recall the layout of Kagi’s results page—because I wasn’t spending time there. My ad hoc searches were perfectly answered by the first result. I clicked, got what I needed, and moved on.

I judge a search engine by two things: how quickly I get what I want and the quality of the experience along the way. The more I have to tweak my original search, click through multiple results, or dig through pages, the worse my experience.

When testing a new search engine, people often input casual queries and judge it based on the results. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. That’s why I make it my default search engine for a full month (or until I get frustrated—whichever comes first). The true test is when I’m working on something and need a quick answer. That’s when I really know whether a search engine is working for me, and boy does Kagi deliver!