Using Kagi instead of Google for search

Google search has been going steadily downhill for at least a decade, and it's been a long time since they've had any meaningful motivation to actually make it good—their goals at this point are to maximize ad impressions, push their AI stuff, keep people on their site as much as possible, and track everything they do there.

Kagi is a terrific alternative. It's a paid service, and it seems weird at first to pay for search when there are various free options even aside from Google, but that's really the only way to get a search engine that is actually incentivized to deliver the best results they can in a clean way with zero ads. It's very customizable (e.g., they'll provide AI answers if you want, or you can turn that off, which I did immediately), and they have extensions to make it work invisibly as a default search engine on iPhones and Android even though it's not built into the OS settings. I signed up about a year ago just on a monthly plan to give it a shot, switched to annual shortly thereafter, and haven't looked back.