@benjojo Kagi uses a mix of many different search engines, including its own. At the top of the desktop version it says how many results are from its own systems.

@benjojo I believe as a meta search engine it still relies on a lot of other spiders. But it’s what it does with the results that matters.

I find the fastGPT service it comes with is surprisingly useful. It doesn’t use AI in the main search, which is good.

@benjojo A Redditor called benjojogv. But at least it gives the sources!

I’ve been quite impressed overall with Kagi. There’s a free one month trial to give it a go. What’s interesting is how hard Apple makes it to change your default search engine to one not on the list. It’s almost as if they are making money from those listings. Wait…

@benjojo
@james
Kagi doesnt crawl for discovery, just indexing, thats one major difference. A *lot* less traffic. Their index is also, ime, the best out there right now. I can actually find what I want unlike google.
Plus a very nice sprinkling of actual pro-user features like custom domain rankings, lenses, et al. It's worth giving a try.

@benjojo … and the lenses help with programming queries

@benjojo@benjojo.co.uk I’ve used bing in the past and was hooked on google for many years as it kinda became the defacto search engine. I did however switch over to DDG about 5-6 years ago and what kept me using it was the shebang system they have in place. Makes doing searches on other websites so much faster once you learn the correct prefixes and I use that every day now. I know browsers now support doing searches on websites based on the domain you entered but quickly looking something up on GitHub for example using !gh <term> is just so much faster

@benjojo@benjojo.co.uk kagi and mojeek are custom search algorithms. dunno about ddg

@benjojo @breadcat DuckDuckGo takes about where their search results come from here: https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

@benjojo@benjojo.co.uk @breadcat@kitty.social Kagi uses their own index named Teclis

Also I doubt DDG gets the full Bing index, they probably just use the Bing Web Search API.

@benjojo ddg search results are more than just bing:
https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-vs-duckduckgo/301997/
https://duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/results/sources/

But their USP is all about privacy, so as a minimum: "what's the difference between bing vs ddg?" = the amount of tracking data M$ and their partners can learn about you

@benjojo your not wrong. I've used Google since late 90s, it was the best for a long time. But it has really tanked in the last year.