I havent made the leap yet, but it's pushing me closer and closer to a paid service like kagi. The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent but it might be the only option for sanity.

I recently switched to Kagi after years of using ddg and have been very happy with it. You get 100 free searches. Before I made the leap, I spent a period of time with Firefox set up to use kagi if I typed `k <query>`. I found myself using kagi for the vast majority of my searches pretty quickly, the signal:noise ratio is substancially better, especially for technical subjects.

> The thought of paying a subscription for search is abhorrent

I've found myself paying for more and more products that I used to get for free. Given how expensive running a search engine is ad revenue is necessary for a free product. Advertisers pay more if they are getting clicks and conversions... Obviously this ends up impacting search results. Additionally, the tradition SEO model went from bad to worse with LLMs.

Anyways, up until very recently I would've agreed with you, but ultimately this was a pretty easy expense to justify after a short trial.

Just as a counter, I tried Kagi and was unimpressed. I didn’t get any better results than normal google stuff, I couldn’t see what would be worth paying for.

Fastmail and Kagi. You won't look back.

While I'm no longer a customer, using Kagi showed me just how much the Google experience can be improved. The $10/month is tiny for the quality of life improvement.

I ended up building my own search instead - whoever controls your search results also controls how you find information and what you see, so I felt I needed to start building my own index. If you don't want to go down that rabbit hole and don't mind Kagi's politics, $10/month is a small price to pay to get a better search experience.

I have used Kagi for a few years now, worth the cash