I hope not to sound like I'm blaming you, but do you actually use the features that are unique to Kagi? Over time my manually configured block/lower/raise/pin list has continuously grown, quickly leading to higher and higher quality search results. I also have integrated custom lenses and bangs into my workflow more and more over time. I often end up searching seemingly very generic things and getting exactly what I'm looking for in the first or second result. Maybe my results after the first couple are weird too, but it doesn't really matter to me because I don't actually get very deep into results most of the time.

DDG is like that. If it can't find any more matches it seems to spam random results.

I tried Kagi and really enjoyed it but the pricing tier doesn't sit right with me, it's not that much better than DDG for my purposes. All these monthly subs start to add up. I'd be happier if there was a lifetime tier.

How much would you drop for a lifetime license of a product like this?

A lifetime subscription on a service for a one-time fee has so many perverse incentives I wouldn't trust a company offering this.

> DDG is like that.

DDG and Kagi both use Bing data. That could be the reason

Ok, maybe it’s not that the quality of Kagi results is so high, it’s more that the quality of Google results is so poor. Just not having to deal with all the spam is a winner to me.

Google results were rather like this in the golden age of Google searches. But the bad results can give you an idea of how to tweak your search to get what you're actually looking for.

The modern, more polished Google search can make it literally impossible to find things that exist, because Google tries too hard to provide what it thinks you're looking for.