DuckDuckGo had a noticeable drop in quality a few years ago.

I think they stopped using the Yandex index at some point and solely used Bing's index. This may have been the cause.

I tried kagi some time ago, and I liked it a lot for similar reasons as the author. It has everything which made DuckDuckGo such a joy to use, ánd reliably good sesrch results. I also love the filter site and boost options, and the fact that the most used are shared on a "leaderboard".

The part I didn't love was the (understable, but annoying) need to login. This is especially a pain when you use a lot of different devices, delete cookies and friends regularly or use private browser windows. I tried using the method where you need to supply the ligin token manually, but, if I recall correctly, it was a painful experience because once you logged in elsewhere it would change, so it became an effort to keep the token in sync manually on all devices.

Thanks.

Need to login will repel a lot of people who would test quality of Kagi search otherwise. But they want paying users, not lurkers.

The need to login, to be associated with a profile, is a feature, not a bug.

Elsewhere, you are associated with a profile, both before logging in, and then if ever logged in, that association persists logged in or not. One of these feels more honest.

I have absolutely no issue with DuckDuckGo, for what it's worth.

I know people here absolutely love Kagi and would defend it to the death, but I cannot fathom paying a subscription fee for a limited number of searches.

I'm guessing that I just don't search the same types of topics or questions that many others here do, because the complaints about DDG are foreign to me.

I haven't used it in 5+ years, but it was terrible for any non-US result. Also, at the time the crappy blogspam always found a way to surface to the first page, which is a major deal breaker I have with qwant and Ecosia.

All Google alternatives are very insufficient if you're searching in a different language than English. Except for Kagi.

with DDG set to default on my browsers, I kept having to manually enter google.com just to search 50% of my search content. I eventually decided to just go back to Google and I don't have that issue now that I've switched to Kagi.

Why not just append !g after the query? IMO, bang patterns are probably the most useful feature of DDG to me. Being able to search Wikipedia (across multiple languages), wiktionary, YouTube, etc. without needing to configure them all manually on all my devices is pretty nice.

With DDG I kept looking for better results, which I typically found, not so with Kagi.