I’ve been messing around with the Kagi search engine and their lightweight Orion browser.
The idea with Kagi is that you pay for it upfront; it’s not supported by ads or telemetry (i.e. selling your data). There’s a free trial plan with 100 free searches; after that you pay from 5 to 25 bucks a month.
The idea was anathema to me at first, but then I thought about what a useless basket of snot the typical Google result has become. Maybe it makes more sense to pay for the product than to be the product.
Haven’t nerved myself up to pay yet, but my trial searches have yielded more-relevant and less-cluttered results than anything I’ve seen from Google for a long time.
Their canine logo and motto (“Let’s fetch…”) reminded me a little of Lycos. Which I would say is a blast from the past, except that (according to a Kagi search) the Lycos search engine still exists.
