Kagi is better. Kagi is damn good, as much a revelation as the Google of old. Not free, though.

As a user and fan of kagi, the problem with kagi is that it reveals how badly degraded the web is.

The vast majority of original content is now in one or another social network or on discord. News articles are an exception, though the news has its own problems. Some wikis still exist and are actively maintained, of course, but not a ton. If it's a topic that's academically studied you might find information in papers, but those have poor web visibility and are better located with specialty tools. LLMs seem to be quite good at locating papers, though.

I've used Kagi for a few years but it's gotten significantly worse for me the last year or so. I'm curious if anyone else has seen the same thing happen. I'll search for something and usually see a bunch of barely relevant SEO sites. Avoiding this is why I started paying for Kagi in the first place, so it's been disappointing to see. Marginalia Search (https://marginalia-search.com/) seems to be better at finding content written by humans rather than SEO specialists, but it's not a silver bullet (for example, the last time I checked they didn't index non-English sites).

Google is still very good, just get rid of evil stuff on their homepage to get the old google.

https://www.google.com/search?&udm=web&q=hackernews

Been using Kagi search for more than a year. Been happy. I use GPT/et al for the little things (e.g. unit conversions, rather than search for and then try to use an enshittified web page from 10 years ago). But for actual real tech leaning content, Kagi has been pretty good.