A few months ago, journalist Jason Kebler had some friends over to his house, and in the middle of conversation he went to look something up on the internet on a search engine. I searched it on Kagi which

is not Google and they saw my screen and they're like what the hell is that like what what are you doing

because they were just they had never seen the site before essentially

What is Kagi? Kagi is a Google competitor.

It's an alternative search engine and it costs $10 a month to use and I've been using it for three months.

And I have essentially forgotten that I use it because it just works so well.

Like I don't even think about it.

In my opinion, Jason is one of the best tech

journalists working today. He's a co-founder of the independent tech

journalism site 404 media and his experience trying to get

404's articles picked up on Google is part of his frustration with the search

engine. They are not really on Google News, which at previous jobs was a huge driver of

traffic for us and we started noticing that our articles are being scraped by AI and they were being republished on these really like very spammy websites like AI versions of our articles with just like tiny changes and we were

noticing that many of these websites were getting indexed by Google news and

we're ranking above us on Google. And so we just started writing about how this

was happening and sort of going down this rabbit hole and realizing that Google is not

surfacing results that I wanted to see just as a user.

In the story that you wrote about this,

there's this sentence that stuck out to me.

You say, I'll probably never switch back to

Google unless Kagi becomes significantly worse. Or Google reverses years of annoying interface and search decisions that have prioritized

ads, sponsored results, spammy affiliate content, and AI generated result.

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