I switched to DuckDuckGo about four years ago when quality of google reached a stage that alternatives become necessary. The move felt right ethically, but the search quality did not match what Google used to be in its golden years. DuckDuckGo gets the job done for basic queries, but it’s nowhere close to the precision that Google once delivered in 2010. Google itself had been steadily degrading, and that is because of SEO spam 16 companies have systematically gamed the system . The search is worse for everyone, turning results pages into SEO battlegrounds for revenue rather than helpful information sources. The same way ChatGPT and LLMs replaced stack overflow for programming questions, search landscape itself is changing.
By 2024, I realized that no single search engine could handle my information needs the way it used to be. I’ve evolved into using a multi tool approach that combines ChatGPT for conceptual questions and brainstorming with web search. But hallucinations were a problem in the earlier versions and it is constantly getting better. In 2025, I got access to Perplexity pro for research that provided current information with citations, SearXNG for searches which I control. Each tool serves a specific purpose in my information workflow, and together they’ve restored that sense of actually finding what I’m looking for rather than wading through sponsored content and SEO spam.
The newest revelation came a few weeks back when I discovered Kagi’s advanced filtering capabilities from the thread Hacker News discussion around search quality which was about a blog post Reading about how others use Kagi’s blocklists and domain management opened my eyes to search customization I never knew I needed. Being able to permanently block Pinterest from image searches, downrank content farms, and boost trusted sources has created a personalized search experience that feels like having a research assistant who knows exactly what garbage to filter out. confirmed I wasn’t alone in feeling that mainstream search had fundamentally broken, and Kagi represented a return to search engines serving users instead of advertisers. I would like to pay for a few months and see how this will improve my search.
What strikes me most is how this mirrors the broader trend of moving away from free services that extract value from users. Just as I ditched Adobe’s subscription model for tools I actually own, paying for Kagi feels like reclaiming search from the ad driven race to the bottom. The piece from yesterday Ars Technica piece about dumping Google for Kagi captures this perfectly; sometimes the best solution is simply refusing to accept that “good enough” is actually good enough. Search is too fundamental to our digital lives to settle for mediocrity, and in 2025, building a diverse search strategy isn’t just practical, it’s essential for anyone who still believes information should be findable rather than marketable.