This matches my experience as well. Kagi has useful results much more often.

> Kagi makes it trivial to define new bangs

Lately I’ve moved to doing this at the browser level instead of via a search engine. It’s not a huge speed difference, but in principle it seems wrong to have an extra round-trip out to a search engine to redirect me to another site, when I can set up the keywords locally and go directly. Firefox makes it easy to do: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-search-from-address...

Same. I never hit the limits of my Kagi plan, but it motivated me to add Firefox @searches for things like PyPI, where I know exactly what I want.

> One critical difference I’ve noticed is that frequently used bangs with DDG, but almost never with Kagi.

I use bangs all the time and wouldn’t even use Kagi without them. It’s so convenient when I know I want results from a specific page.

I've used DDG for years before switching over to Kagi and I was accustomed to having to use the !s bang daily (and !g before I found out about !s). On Kagi I literally never use it, since it already incorporates Google search results and filters out a lot of crap.

I've also defined some custom bangs to search private Jira and Confluence instances with some default filters applied, because the default search on those instances was driving me insane. It took me a long time to convince myself to pay $10 a month for a search engine, but I've never looked back.

I'm currently experimenting with hostname rewrite rules.