Back to Kagi

One blogger tried a full-on search engine rebound tour — Google, DuckDuckGo, Brave, Qwant, even a custom setup — and ended up dramatically running back to Kagi, saying everything else felt worse. His biggest complaint? Too many search tools now shove AI answers, videos, and flashy extras at people who just want plain text results. That instantly lit up the community, because apparently search engine loyalty is now as emotional as a messy ex situation.

The strongest reaction was basically: "Yep, same." One commenter joked they spend half their time on Hacker News talking about Kagi, then rattled off a love list: keyboard shortcuts, control over results, and the feeling that paying for search means the company actually has to please users. Another fan was less romantic but equally annoyed, wishing Apple would stop making it awkward to use Kagi in Safari. In other words: the fans are loyal, but they’re still mad at the gatekeepers.

But the real spicy subplot came from the skeptics. One commenter dropped the hot-take grenade: are search engines even relevant anymore when grandparents are already asking ChatGPT by voice? That turned the whole conversation from “which search engine is best” into “is classic search quietly dying?” Meanwhile, one practical soul popped in with the low-drama lifehack of using DuckDuckGo’s stripped-down page for plain results — the digital equivalent of saying, “have you tried just ordering off the secret menu?”