Kagi is 80% faster and 70% less carbon intensive than Google
I desperately wanted Kagi to be my new search engine, but alas, no dice. At the end of my 100 search trial I wasn&#x27;t even sure it was a practically better option than DDG. And believe me, I tried: I even coerced myself to stop adding !g and made it my browser&#x27;s default search engine. Sometimes the results were good, and it reliably searched for <i>what I asked it to</i>, which is nice. OTOH though, it felt like it didn&#x27;t have a deep index and, when I searched for things that were obscure but I knew existed, I sometimes found myself needing to try DDG and Google after.<p>Unfortunately, before being concerned about carbon footprint, the product needs to come first. I have no idea how an actually good search engine can be profitable and sustainable without ads and tracking, but it doesn&#x27;t do any good to have a lower carbon footprint than your competitor if you&#x27;re dead in ten years.<p>Surely eventually, <i>something</i> will happen. Someone will have a breakthrough moment. As of now, all that&#x27;s happening in my view is that Google is getting so much worse that it just lowers the expectations for competitors. Maybe eventually it will get so bad that you may as well never use it, but that&#x27;s not exactly a fantastic outcome.<p>Is building a good search engine and index from scratch in 2023 simply infeasible? I know Google went through great pains to optimize their index and had a couple novel tricks for ranking results... but the internet is infinitely more massive in every dimension, despite the death of literally libraries of useful blogs, forums and topic-specific websites, and now it seems even Google, with their massive budget, is struggling to deal with SPAM on top of ruining the search experience in general. It&#x27;s easy to just blame enshittification, because duh, but I wonder if more specifically, the Internet is literally just collapsing under the weight of its own growth and an increasingly weak signal to noise ratio.