Based on some comments here on HN, I've been playing with both Kagi and Orion. I've found the searches on Kagi (for tech stuff) as good as google at least. Better than DDG and Brave of late. The internet content just honestly feels like it's decaying. As for Orion, it's decent on MacOS, but really buggy on iOS, where I've reverted to Brave.
One of the things on the largest end for me that I don't see mentioned here very often, is how amazing the development team has been! It's tremendously refreshing and amazing to be using a product, encounter something not working right, write up a feedback post, and see it fixed in the next changelog. That's where the local bit of the analogy comes from. It's small, and I think that's brilliant. It makes you feel seen and heard, something that is absolutely beyond hopelessly lost when using any sort of Google product. You're a part of a paying customer base, you're not some minuscule cog in a massive conglomerate.
The pace of development is also wonderful. Getting new little features released often and watching the ongoing development with things like Kagi Map. I can only imagine this is what it was like to live during the golden age of construction and development in the US, seeing all these new buildings go up all around you.
There's also the search of course which so far has been great. I think it's power comes from the lack of ads of course but also the filtering, which makes it *your* search. Little features like appending @hn at the end of your search instead of site:news.ycombinator.com, or as mentioned by gutt3r_punk, the question mark to bring up the AI summary answer only on the queries that I want it to be on, not every single search on Google.
solid recommend
I love that Kagi allows me to make the huge list of domains to ignore. No more Pinterest results along with many other sites I hate polluting my results. Add in the quick answers from AI models when I end my query with a question mark and I’m a very happy user.
It would be neat if there was some Chrome extension that could do a blind test on the results... i.e. randomly replace some Google results with Kagi results, record which ones I don't bounce from, and then report back to me after a month "You have a strong/moderate/weak preference for Kagi/Google results! Here's the data..."
Or if Manifest v3 really kills uBlock, I'll probably disengage from the Google ecosystem as much as possible and move everything off, including adopting Kagi and Orion at that point. But I'd really rather not, just because it's a huge hassle to de-Googleify.
Edit: I forgot to add that I can only use Google with uBlacklist filtering out a bunch of domains (Quora, Forbes, YouTube, Medium, etc.). Otherwise it's unusable.
On https://kagi.com/welcome, your logo links to https://kagi.com/index.html which cannot be found