I've been starting to use kagi for search. I'm still using google by default, but when I get a screen full of ads and clickbait articles I turn to kagi and it's almost always better.

Maybe you should try an opposite approach. When kagi gives you useless results switch to Google.

This is what I do. Kagi gets there 95% of the time. Plus I get to down/up rank results. Plus no ads. Plus I feel confident I’m getting the best result for me and not for advertisers. Truth be told I’ve been using “site:reddit.com” for years now already.

Google still has the lead with the answer box and older results. They’ve been collecting data for longer and I suspect their indexing heuristics are incredible.

I wanted to love kagi, but they still have the same fuzzy search that makes it about impossible to find something odd that shares keywords with commonplace things.

Google is still my default as 9 out of 10 I get the answer I need quickly. Bing does my other 10% where Google provides junk or stale results.... Google Search really is declining. I'm tempted to move my default over to Bing for month or two just to experiment. On the Maps front, I'm really enjoying Apple Maps as it has less junk - I just want a map!!

> I'm tempted to move my default over to Bing for month or two just to experiment.

I switched my default over to Bing about two months ago and it is surprisingly good. Subjectively I would say it is better more often than it is worse.

You should try Brave search.