I've generally found searching for symbols to work quite well. It's a mixture of the two. You can check the results for "what is %" here: https://kagi.com/search?q=what+is+%25&r=no_region&sh=Qd1RlT2...

Why do your search links work, but the ones from Kagi's own "Features" page just take me to a login page?

It looks like the like the blog post linked to by Features links to plain search page URLs, which only work for logged-in users. I used the Share feature to get a sharable link. I guess that page needs to be updated.

Thanks for the heads up, fixed.

Thank you so much!

^^^^ this is so frustrating to me.

I've sometimes found that including quotes around the symbol gives me more relevant results since Google should interpret that as "find results that contain this exact string". However I just tried it with your % example and the results were unchanged, I have found this to work myself in other instances so perhaps it's a mixed bag

God trying to look up what some string of characters in a random programming language is feels like a Sisyphean task in Google. Try getting Google to understand what a typed hole in Haskell is without knowing it's called a typed hole